


Forever

by Cerfblanc



Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: Coming of Age, Consensual Underage Sex, Deja Vu, Elisabeth will be 16/17 when things get super serious, F/M, Girlhood, Slow Burn, Teen Angst, Young Love, just adding the tag in case
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:47:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 24
Words: 64,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25022641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerfblanc/pseuds/Cerfblanc
Summary: She’s a child when she first meets him. She’s a girl when she falls in love with him. She wants him now. He’s wanted her forever.
Relationships: Elisabeth Doppler & Jonas Kahnwald, Elisabeth Doppler/Noah | Hanno Tauber
Comments: 294
Kudos: 472





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Like everyone, I’ve been mooning over these two since I finished Dark, and this is something to take the pain away lmao. It will be a couple of chapters or so, and takes place in an AU where everyone is happy and nobody dies and everyone exists okaY (I’m also assuming Elisabeth can lip-read to a certain extent). 
> 
> I hope y’all like it <3

She’s sat at the kitchen table when, in her head, she quietly wishes for something sudden and unpredictable to happen. Not now, or today, or tomorrow—but _one_ day, she wishes for something out of the ordinary to land at her feet. 

“You took my lipstick again,” Franziska utters, and Elisabeth feels her sister tug a lock of her wispy hair as she walks past to the fridge. 

“ _I put it back_.” Elisabeth gestures once her sister is seated.

“Whatever.”

_I want something different to happen_ , she thinks half-consciously, _I want change_. 

It had always been the same in Winden. It had always been the same within her home. Get up. Go to school. The thought of socialising with classmates had become suddenly insignificant when she bit into her piece of toast. 

She remembers last weekend, at one of the many get-togethers Katharina hosted, when Mikkel had humoured her with his Houdini acts in his bedroom. She remembers seeing Jonas and Martha slip away through the backdoor that evening. Her sister had vanished too, most likely with Magnus. 

“I’m seeing Magnus after school. Dad said that’d be OK,” Franziska says, tapping Elisabeth on the shoulder to get the girl’s full attention before signing the rest, “ _you can walk back yourself?_ ”

The question seemed like a request. But it wasn’t. It was a passive command.

Elisabeth responds with a nod. She feels a slither of disappointment plague her chest. She knew the older you got the more you could do, but it still felt unfair. Franziska was company for her.

Elisabeth watches her gets up from the table minutes afterward, licking butter from the tips of her fingers. She had painted her nails a pale pink. “Also, it’s meant to be raining later on. In the afternoon. Bring an umbrella or coat, or something.”

* * *

She felt oddly mature for an eleven year old. Or maybe that was what all eleven year olds thought. Maybe she was meant to be thinking that, at this age. Perhaps it was the foundation of the bridge that would soon force her into womanhood.

The thought of growing up excited Elisabeth. Growing up meant no rules. Growing up meant she could finally do what she wanted. She wouldn’t have to be controlled anymore. She could leave. If she wanted too.

_Maybe that’s what I want_. She nibbles her bottom lip while scribbling down the date in the margin of her History book. _Maybe I’m just sick of being here, in the now._

She wanders through the rest of the school day like a ghost. Her classmate and former “boyfriend” Yasin asked during their lunch hour why she had been so quiet. Elisabeth had grinned. She thought it was a joke at first, she found the irony of it funny, but then she noticed there was no smile on Yasin’s face. He seemed somewhat worried. She eventually said she was just tired, though her explanation didn’t seem to console him.

When school finished Elisabeth decided to trek back home through the town. She figured she would feel too desolate taking the usual route without Franziska purposely bumping into her side for fun.

She was halfway through the town when she felt rain hit the back of her neck. Then she remembered what her sister said at breakfast, something about taking an umbrella or coat. She said it would rain, and Elisabeth had forgotten that it would, in the midst of her dissatisfaction with her current place in life.

She grits her teeth. Now she felt stupid. It had started to rain heavily. She wore the cream jumper her father had bought her. Wool and rain didn’t really compliment one another.

It began to fall in torrents minutes later, and she quickly noticed the stream forming at one side of the pavement, the water trickling into a nearby drain. Her footsteps began to echo a splash. When she felt the rain begin to soak under her clothes, she glanced around the street for shelter, and crossed the road when she noticed the local church.

The weather and the world became distant when she pushed inside and shut the wooden doors behind her. She automatically felt the coolness of the church settle on her shoulders. She turns slowly, and momentarily glances at the pretty stained glass windows, and breathes in the scent of the aged mahogany furnishings. She was alone.

It’s only when she goes to set her bag on one of the benches does she notice a figure stood near the minimal altar; her heart pounds hard, startled. 

A lithe young man, no older than twenty years of age, was stood with a floor brush in one hand. Elisabeth blinked. She watches him set the brush aside, and he begins to walk toward her. Then, when they’re a metre apart, just as she remembers she had packed a notebook in her bag for communication, he both spoke and signed, “Are you cold?”

_ How? _

It was the first word that had came to her in that moment, and it made her both perplexed and excited that she had met another person that knew how to communicate the same way as she did.

She unconsciously takes in the boy’s features. He was of average height. His face was youthful and arguably soft, yet it embodied a maturity that seemed to exceed far beyond whatever age he really was. His eyes were quietly observant, and a sensitive, oddly warming aura hung about him. Perhaps that was just because she was stood in a church, and people were conditioned to feel suddenly spiritual when they entered a place of worship. 

Elisabeth was old enough to realise when she found someone physically attractive, but she never dwelt on the thought, because it was of no benefit to her at this age. However, that didn’t rule out how she continued to feel the nagging stab of curiosity puncture her gut the more she stared at this enigmatic young man.

“…I can get you a towel, if you want.” He says, almost hesitantly, gesturing once more. Embarrassment suddenly plagues her when she realises she hadn’t replied to him.

“ _Sorry—yes—if that’s OK_.” She quickly says (her movements erratic), feeling even more stupid than she did before, but her awkwardness ceases when a small smile appears on the boy’s face. 

“Come with me.” He makes a brief motion with his hand. She’s led past the benches and to the right of the altar, and then they enter a narrow, dark-lit room with shelves and cupboards on either sides of the walls. Elisabeth watches him reach into one of the top cupboards, and he takes out a towel.

“ _I’ll go once the rain stops_.” She gestures when he turns to her. He presses the towel into her hands.

“Stay as long as you like.” He replies. He brushes a few fingers against her shoulder then, and his face changed the moment he did. “You’re—soaked through.”

Elisabeth didn’t reply. She wasn’t sure how to. She had never been in a situation like this before. It was so odd, so random, yet somehow comforting and intriguing all at once.

She’s sat on one of the benches, looking out of the coloured windows while drying her hair to monitor how heavy the rain was, when the boy approaches her with a black knitted pullover.

He sets it down at her side, his movements similar to that of a wary cat. “You can wear this, if you want—“

“ _How did you know to sign?_ ” Elisabeth asks.

The boy was silent. She noticed how he gnawed on the inside of his bottom lip. Then, finally, with slight hesitancy, “I’ve…seen you before. In the woods. Near the caves.”

Elisabeth remembered then. That happened last week, after the party. She and Mikkel had followed their siblings into the forest out of boredom. They eventually found the group smoking poorly made joints.  


She realised how vague his explanation sounded then.  This church-boy must have been aimlessly wandering in the dark that evening, and he must have been quite close in order to see how Elisabeth communicated.  


She feels her gut plummet in confusion.

When she looks at him again he still has that observant gaze etched into his face. He blinks, glances away,  then meets her eyes again. Elisabeth watches his lips. “My name is Noah.”

_Noah_.  


She relays the name in her head. 

_Noah_. 

It was delicate. 

_Noah_. 

It sounded gentle in her mind.

She introduces herself. “ _My name is Elisabeth_.”

“That’s a pretty name.” Noah says, almost immediately. She feels her cheeks burn instinctively. 

“ _Yours is cute_.”

“You think so?” He’s smiling, and Elisabeth catches a glimpse of his teeth. She nods.

She wonders how old he is. She’s afraid to ask. “ _Where do you live?_ ”

His lips part, and he blinks before replying. “Outside of town. Not far from here.”

Winden was small. Sometimes too small. Elisabeth, like most, and like everyone, knew the vast majority of the community. Perhaps not by name but by face. She had never seen Noah before. He would stand out within the community for sure. 

“I haven’t lived here long.” Noah adds, as if on cue with what she was thinking. She goes to take off her jumper, grimacing in the process. She was glad the t-shirt she wore underneath was semi-dry.

“ _Where did you live before?_ ” Elisabeth asks, after pulling on the sweater he’d given her. There was distinct scent to it.

“Vechta.” He answers.

“ _Why come here?_ ”

His gaze settles on her then. It becomes visibly intent. She envisions a red thread between them, as if bounding their consciences together. She felt oddly comfortable with this stranger, but maybe that was just because he seemed fluent in sign language, and her newfound fondness of him was just an attachment because of that.

“ _I…don’t know_.” Noah signs, his gestures slow. 

Elisabeth glances at her lap. She feels the fabric of the pullover. The texture was waffle-like. She looks across to the church windows, and asks him if the rain had stopped. He gets up from the bench and she follows after. When he opens the church doors she’s met with the smell of fallen rain. Sunlight had broken through the grey clouds.

“Think you’ll make it home before it starts up again?” Noah asks.

Elisabeth folds up her jumper and stuffs it into her bag. She catches that distinct aroma again—from the clothing he’d given her—when she goes to brush a lock of damp hair behind her ear. It was a gentle, boyish kind of scent.

“ _I hope_.” She responds. Before she steps out, she thanks him, and asks, “ _Will I see you again?_ ”

A half-smile spreads across Noah’s lips. He glances down at the church steps before looking up at her. She watches him run a brief hand through his disconnected hair. He looked nice when he did that.

It’s only then does he reply, and for a moment Elisabeth thinks he’s joking, “I’ve got nowhere else to go.“

“ _Is that a yes?_ ”

“Maybe.” He looks at her with soft eyes.

When he shuts the doors after her, and she’s back pondering down the street homeward bound, a strange and aimless thought enters her head. It stays with her conscience until she reaches home.

_I’ve met him before_ , she thinks, with a note of warmth blooming in her gut. _Whether that be in real life, or in a dream, we’ve met before._

Perhaps Noah was the difference she had been after.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’ve known one another for a year. Noah takes Elisabeth to the caves. They both share a confession.

It was four o’clock when she got home, and she slipped through the backdoor unnoticed. She figured her mother was still at work, and her father was elsewhere within the house. Franziska would be with Magnus. 

Elisabeth put her wet sweatshirt into the laundry basket on her way upstairs to her room. She pulled off the one Noah had given her, and stopped for a moment, the fabric bunched between her fingers. 

_ He was nice. _

Both hesitant and curious, she brings it close to breathe in the distinct aroma. A note of maturity hits her. Then faint musk. And then the boyishness she came across before. She stuffs it in one of her drawers when she feels her cheeks burn. She wonders if it was his. 

_ He was too nice.  _

She’s sat at the kitchen table an hour later, poking at her dinner with the end of her fork. Franziska was sat at her side, and Elisabeth had picked up on her sister’s comely glow the second she sat down. Her sister was everything painful and beautiful. She was both elixir and poison for boys her age. Elisabeth admired her for that. She wanted those qualities too. Franziska could go from one end to another in a matter of seconds, and it seemed to always benefit her. 

Noah is in the forefront of her head when Elisabeth feels her mother press a kiss to her cheek. She envisions his lithe fingers dance across the back of her neck. Charlotte sits down on the edge of her daughter’s bed, and brushes back a few strands of hair from her small face. 

“ _…You come home late now._ ” Elisabeth says, her gestures slow. She felt tired. She wanted to sleep. Maybe Noah would appear before her if she closed her eyes. 

Her mother purses her lips and blinks once. “I know. My shifts change often. Your father is here though, when you get home.”

“ _Not really_.”

“Not really?”

“ _He’s here. But it’s like he’s absent at the same time_.”

Charlotte nods once, and doesn’t say anything else. She blinks again. Elisabeth watches her breathe deep, and then she gets up and kisses her daughter on the head once more before leaving the room. 

Elisabeth shuts her eyes when darkness overcomes her. And she falls asleep before Noah has the chance to appear behind her eyes. 

* * *

Maybe he was just the host to one of those random, half-formed temporary attachments that would occur in her life infrequently. She thought of that the moment she met him.

It had been a week since Elisabeth last encountered Noah. She was walking home with Franziska one bleak Monday afternoon, when he happened to pass her side like a spectre. 

Elisabeth had looked back almost instantly to find him glancing over his shoulder too. She quickly noticed his questionable attire; he looked like a tame caricature of a _Mad Max_ figure, dressed and prepared for the apocalypse. A rucksack was slung across his back, parts of his hair clung together with dark, earthy grime, and carbon residue stuck to his clothes and dewy skin. He looked as if he had been (literally) living under a rock for several days. Yet somehow, underneath all of the elemental dirt that clung to him, Elisabeth still found him attractive. 

_He’s beautiful_ , she thinks.

She would have stopped right then and there if it weren’t for Franziska glued to her hip, and she felt suddenly trapped, as if she were being pulled away from approaching liberation in human form. 

Noah had stopped, and turned slowly. His eyes never left hers. He held one of those bulky searchlights in his right hand. His knuckles were grazed and blushed with premature bruising. 

When she couldn’t handle his intent gaze anymore, Elisabeth reluctantly turned her head away from him, and glanced to Franziska, who had been too focused on her phone to notice what Elisabeth was visually mooning over. 

* * *

“Have you been inside the caves before?” Noah asks, breaking the silence with his own voice, and a few half-formed signs. 

Elisabeth shakes her head at him, watches his lips. She looks back at the ground as they walk, and occasionally scuffs the soles of her boots against the gravel. 

They had known one another for a year now. She had turned twelve a month ago. She still hadn’t asked how old Noah was—a fraction of her was still afraid to ask, for reasons unknown—though upon close observation she decided for herself that he was at least eighteen. She used Jonas and Magnus for a mental comparison; they were both the same age, their bodies were both wiry, and they had young faces on the verge of adulthood. Noah embodied similar qualities, if not the same. 

He taps her shoulder. She looks up at him. “I could take you there. To the caves.”

She nods in response. 

Elisabeth often wondered if Franziska had started to notice her absence. She usually annoyed the life out of her when she wasn’t with Magnus, it was almost like a subconscious routine they both fell into, and it had started to disappear the moment Noah stepped into the picture. 

With mild horror, Elisabeth attempted to envision how Franziska would react if she were to find out about Noah. The confrontation wouldn’t be pretty. She would automatically assume he was a predator of sorts, solely because he seemed to be several years older than Elisabeth. 

She feels him tap her shoulder again. 

“What’s wrong?” Noah asks. He must have noticed she was deep in thought. She remembered him mentioning once that her inner feelings also showed on her face. 

“ _Nothing_.” She says. She wondered what he would look like when asleep. He seemed like he would be the type of person to curl into the wall against the bed.

He pokes her in the side this time, and it tickles her before she smacks his hand away. 

“ _Are you ticklish?_ ” Noah presses. He signs out the words with a deadpanned face that makes Elisabeth want to laugh. He could be incredibly wooden when he wanted to be. His humour was mostly dry, Elisabeth had yet to fully understand that, but they bonded over the smallest of scenarios that sometimes weren’t even that funny. 

“ _No. I’m not_.” She answers.

Noah blinks. “You’re a bad liar.”

“ _I’m good at lying_.” 

“You’re not.”

Elisabeth grins. He smiles back. She enjoyed his teasing, playing the back-and-forth game that involved an aimless debate that always ended without a conclusion. 

“This way,” Noah says, and she watches his lips as he tugs at her arm. It was then she acknowledged how much she wanted to kiss him. She wanted him to be hers. “I need to bring a couple of things before we go.”

* * *

She finds herself spreading her fingers across his wrist when the darkness of the cave embraces them, and she keeps her eyes to the ground, watching her every step. She quickly felt Noah grasp her hand. His thumb traced an invisible circle against her palm, and she watched his face as he did it, but he never looked down to meet her doe-like eyes. He kept looking forward with the searchlight hanging from his other hand.

They stopped in their tracks three minutes later. Noah let go of her wrist. She watches him set down the searchlight, and it floods the open room of the cave. He goes to one side then, and Elisabeth recognised several belongings of his.

“ _It’s like you live here_.” She says eventually, when they’re sat on a blanket in the middle of the space, surrounded by what Elisabeth could feel was total silence. She absorbs the sight of the cave walls, and how the white light emitting from torch casted deep blue shadows against rough parts of the terrain that surrounded them. She imagines the walls decorated with mellow fairy lights.

“I do.” Noah answers. She shoots him a questioning look, and he breaks into a smile. “I’m joking. I rent out a room. It’s close to your school.”

“ _Then what do you do here?_ ”

He shrugs. “I like being alone.”

Elisabeth swallowed. She hated being alone. She knew, one day, Franziska, Magnus, and everyone else within that group would soon disappear for college or elsewhere. Sure, Mikkel would still be here, along with her parents of course, and she had her school friends—but she felt most at home with the others. She felt as though their lives were deeply intertwined somehow, and that it would be sacrilege to break those ties.

Elisabeth had known the others since early childhood. She’s known Noah for a single year. And yet, she feels like she’s known him forever.

She’s pulled out of her reverie when she spots Noah lifting the searchlight. He sets it at an angle between them, so it shone against the cave wall in front of them. Then, somewhat eager, he shuffles closer to Elisabeth. She frowns a little when he reaches out and forms a shape with his hands, and the shadow hits the wall to reveal a rather intricate silhouette of a rabbit.

Elisabeth’s eyes widened. He was surprisingly good at it. “ _Teach me_.”

“Which animal?”

She thinks. He watches her patiently.

“ _A fox_.” She answers, and Noah takes her hands. She lets him curl her index fingers together, pushes her thumbs up, and straightens out the rest. The process was like an art. He pulls her closer so the shadow could hit the wall. Elisabeth grins when she recognised the side-profile of a fox’s face.

And then she feels a foreign yet familiar warmth spark deep within her.

Slowly, she drops her hands, and watches Noah create the silhouette of a stag.

He isn’t aware the second she leans forward, and it’s just then does he happen to turn his head to glance at her when their lips meet. Elisabeth feels him freeze, and neither of them close their eyes, and she knows it should feel beyond awkward but for some reason it doesn’t—the whole thing is conducted with pure innocence. On Elisabeth’s behalf, anyway.

_I’m kissing him_ , she thinks. _I’m kissing Noah._

She comes away with ease, anxious when she doesn’t feel him move, and his eyes never leave hers until she’s sat back on her heels. His face had changed. He seemed awfully perplexed, but calm and collected at the same time. Perhaps he knew it would happen.

After a moment, Elisabeth watches him sign with faint hesitancy. “ _…Why did you do that?_ ”

A pang of guilt hits her square in the chest. She wasn’t sure what to think. Everything was happening too fast. Why _did_ she do that?

Without another rational thought she forced herself to sign back, her heart riveting and her head swimming within thegirlish fantasy she had created, “ _I like you._ ”

Noah’s face softened.

Elisabeth tears her gaze away from him and swallows down the lump of anxiety that had been birthed into her throat.

_I’ve ruined it_ , she thinks.

Noah taps her forearm. She reluctantly meets his face.

“ _I love you_.” He signs.

Then she feels his breath hit her cheek. And then he’s pressing his lips against hers, and the whole thing is like a fairytale in her head, and him planting a kiss back is like sealing a proposal of sorts—the birth of a promise, though she wasn’t sure what for. It was like an oath. A pledge. A _commitment_. Elisabeth felt no chemistry bloom within her. She couldn’t sense it from him, either. This was so much different. Beneath the peculiar exterior of the situation, there was a mutual fondness they shared that ran deeper than premature desire. It was _beyond_ romance.

Noah gradually pulls away. His lips linger near hers. Elisabeth could smell his hair. And his clothes. And his skin. It was boyish, yet frighteningly mature. There was an undeniable strength that slept beneath his sweetness. She recognised this scent.

When he sits back, he’s blinking, as though he were being brought back to the present. Elisabeth noticed the change of colour in his cheeks. She watches him breathe, and catches sight of his Adam’s Apple. It bobs once.

“Let’s go back, yeah?” Noah says finally, his gestures quick, almost nervous. Elisabeth tried not to smile.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth is thirteen, and has (mainly personal) questions she wants answers for. Noah is the perfect candidate to pester.

They didn’t talk about the kiss again. The reality of it had seem to hit Noah hard—Elisabeth knew when someone was embarrassed to the point where they wanted to put an event to sleep for a while, but she remembered Noah’s words too vividly. She couldn’t just bury his confession as easy as he did. She refused to forget it. She refused to forget what he said to her. She refused to forget what she said to _him_.

Her curiosity for a similar subject came through visibly when, a month or so later after the kiss had happened, and she wasn’t brooding over the aftermath, she asked her sister about sex. She mentioned Magnus, and asked what it felt like with him.

“You have to wait until you find someone you really like.” Franziska answered, the hairbrush she was using snagging her hair. Elisabeth immediately realised how her sister had totally dodged her question and replaced it with a sort of rule. She wanted to know what sex _felt_ like, not what you had to do prior to it happening.

“You have to make sure the person you like is good to you, and that they love you as much as you love them.” Franziska added.

Elisabeth thought of Noah. She said she liked him. He said he loved her. Those were two different things, entirely—weren’t they? She hadn’t expected him to say what he said in the cave. It was overwhelming, but in a good way. It made her wonder if she should have said the same thing in return. 

She observed Franziska, and imagined Magnus at her side. The times Elisabeth had seen them together they were always happy, and there was a cheeky, almost snappy, (also arguably flammable) element to their relationship that sometimes bewildered Elisabeth.

Her mental portrayal of a desirable relationship had been softer than that of what Franziska and Magnus had, and now, when she thought about it more, she was torn between the qualities of the two.

In other words, she was unsure of what she wanted.

But at the same time, a twelve year old girlwasn’t _meant_ to know what she wanted. 

“You’re too young to be in love with someone right now.” Franziska signed with a stern expression, when Elisabeth doesn’t respond. “When you’re older.”

“ _But it can happen at any time before that, can’t it?_ ” Elisabeth adds. She noticesphysical traits of their mother in her sister’s face. 

Franziska pauses. “Maybe? I don’t know. It’s different for everyone.”

Elisabeth slips off the bed, her bare heels hitting the wooden floorboards with a muted thud. That settled it. There was the chance that Noah would still approach her, perhaps not the way Magnus had done with Franziska, but he would come back to her, one way or another. Probably not romantically. At least not yet. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted him that way. She just knew that she had this compulsive need for Noah to be just, _there_. 

She feels her sister tug her arm when she’s about to leave the bedroom, and Elisabeth’s heart begins to pound.

Franziska stares right through her, and it’s like having your soul stripped naked of its secrets. “I haven’t seen much of you lately. You disappear a lot. Where do you go after school?”

A beat. “ _Why_ ,” Elisabeth starts, calculative, “ _do you miss me?_ ” That was always a good response. It was distracting. A teasing deterrent. The annoying familiar poke from the little sibling. 

Franziska rolls her eyes, her signs suddenly dismissive. It had worked. “ _Just making sure you’re not getting into shit, that’s all._ ”

* * *

She’s thirteen years of age when she becomes aware of what manipulation and grooming is.

She knows it’s usually associated with people twice her age, and sometimes people that were only several years older than her. Yet, anyone could groom or manipulate anyone. Age didn’t matter.

Her mind instinctively darted to Noah, and she brings out a checklist in her head.

He didn’t shower her with gifts. He didn’t isolate her. He rarely flattered her in a way that was considered questionable. He didn’t pander her with attention either—Elisabeth had established that he was too shy to do any of this on a frequent basis. It just wasn’t in his nature. Noah treated her as a mutual, as a friend, and as an equal. He wasn’t a harmful person. If he was, Elisabeth was certain he would have taken his opportunity by now, and he hadn’t.

If any of them were to do something potentially harmful to one another, it would be Elisabeth to initiate the first strike. It was clear that she was the one that had the tendency to bite (when provoked). Once, she had almost knocked out a boy’s tooth at school because he had pulled her hair in class. In contrast with the impulsiveness she embodied, Noah was surprisingly docile toward most things, despite his stoic and withdrawn exterior.

Elisabeth never got a true answer from Franziska regarding her question about sex. But she ended up finding something new to ponder on. She was half aware of what masturbation was; she had briefly read about it, and when the reality of the process hit her, it suddenly seemed more taboo than sex.

Shortly afterward, she unashamedly found herself confiding in Noah.

“ _Do you touch yourself?_ ” She signs the words without hesitation, when he was half-aware that she was talking to him. It was autumn, and the woodland had been littered with vivid hues of orange and red. They had been taking a walk near the caves when she dropped the question.

Noah stops in his tracks, scrunches his nose momentarily, furrows his brows, and turns to her so they were stood opposite one another. He forgets to sign, but she could easily read his lips. “What did you say?”

Elisabeth swallows. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. “ _…I asked if you touch yourself_.”

He looks at her blankly. Then blinks. Then blinks again. He opens his mouth to say something, but then doesn’t. He glances away for a second in thought. Then meets her eyes again.

Finally, he replies with both speech and gesture. “Haven’t you— _done it?_ ”

Elisabeth thinks. She had tried to, once. Nothing really happened. After a minute she had pulled her underwear back on and decided that it was a waste of time. “ _I think so. Nothing happened. I probably didn’t do it right. That’s why I’m asking you._ ”

Noah starts walking again, and she follows after him like a cub trailing at its mother’s side. Elisabeth got the impression that she wasn’t meant to be talking to him of all people about this, but she didn’t care.

“I think you should ask someone else, preferably female.” Noah says.

“ _Why can’t you tell me?_ ” She presses.

He stops walking again, and turns to her once more. She catches a glimpse of his Adam’s Apple bob underneath his skin. His skin looked so soft. A primitive part of her wanted to reach out and poke him in the throat and see how he would react. 

“We’re not the same. I don’t have what you have. It’s different for boys.” Noah answers simply. 

“ _Well—what’s it like for boys?_ ”

“I’m not telling you that.”

“ _Come on_.”

“No.”

“ _Please?_ ”

“No. It’s gross.”

Noah probably wasn’t aware how the tips of his ears had been burning red the whole time Elisabeth had been pushing him for answers. 

She gave up as quick as it had happened for his sake, because she could see how awkward he was becoming by the minute, and on the way home he didn’t say much else to her other than ask when they could meet again. 

Noah didn’t seem fazed by Elisabeth’s inquisition, and her gentle probing didn’t seem to annoy him either. If he was uncomfortable with something he would say it to her face, and at the same time never made her feel bad for asking.  


She quickly established the extent of his patience because of this, and decided it wasn’t worth her time asking him things he wasn’t going to respond to.

“ _Will you tell me your age?_ ” Elisabeth says. When he looks at her she can feel a heavy aura of hesitation emit from him, but he immediately answers when he catches sight of the fixated gaze she held.

“I’m twenty-one.”

Elisabeth calculated the difference between them within a matter of seconds. He was older than her by eight years. That meant he was twenty when they had first kissed. She had been twelve.

_That isn’t much_ , she thinks. _It could be worse. It’s not like he’s thirty._

But then she let the information sink into her head a little more, and a hidden part of her wanted to feel unsettled by the imbalance between them, solely because she didn’t feel disturbed by it at all.  


She thought of Franziska and what she would say, and imagined her mother and father—Peter would have Noah by the throat in an instant—and what they would think of the relationship she was indulging in at the tender age of thirteen.

“ _You don’t look twenty-one_.” Elisabeth eventually says, but that had been a lie. Noah looked his age without doubt.

“Thanks.” He replies. He probably knew she was lying too. He wasn’t stupid. “How old are you?”

Elisabeth pauses. This felt like another confession. It was a brief time to verbally undress and judge one another.

“ _Thirteen_.” She says.

She stomps one foot down on some crinkly leaves and wonders if the sound was similar to that of feeling a bone shatter. When they were children, Franziska had compared the sound of crunchy leaves to eating potato crisps. 

She feels Noah’s fingers curl round her upper arm to get her attention, and the feeling makes her squirm. It reminded her of when she was small, and when Peter would yank her away from doing something potentially dangerous.

“ _…It doesn’t scare you?_ ” Noah says, hisgestures careful.

Elisabeth frowns. “ _What?_ ”

“The difference between us. Our age.”

It hit her, then. Noah had been thinking the same thing too, after all. Although, much to Elisabeth’s puzzlement, he seemed more troubled with it than she was.

“ _No_.” She replies, truthful. “ _Does it bother you?_ ”

Noah casts a downward glance. One corner of his mouth quirks in thought. Elisabeth notices the mud plastered on the toes of his boots, and the little razor rips that scarred the thighs and knees of his dark skinny jeans, most likely caused by scrambling around the caves on a frequent basis. His fists were buried into the pockets of a grey parka jacket he had probably picked up from a thrift store in Vechta.

She would occasionally compare the things he did, sometimes with his changing attire. Clean, simple, and seemingly Puritan one minute. Dark, unkempt and grungy the next.

He worked at the local church, as a caretaker of sorts, somehow scratched together enough money for the bedroom and bathroom he rented, and whenever he had lengthy amounts of time on his hands he would trek around the forest for hours. Elisabeth was sure he sometimes stayed out trekking for more than a day or two. He didn’t seem like he would be spiritually in-touch with Mother Nature and all that hippie stuff, but he spent more than enough time outdoors than he did indoors to have that suggested about him.

“I’m okay with it, as long as you’re okay with it.” Noah says. Elisabeth meets his observant eyes. They were unusually gentle today.

“ _Sure_.” She signs, and begins to walk on ahead of him. He follows and catches up beside her.  


A moment after, he points out how their footsteps had fallen in sync with one another. Elisabeth had purposely broken the union of their movement to see his reaction, and it made her laugh. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A stoned Magnus claims that Elisabeth will be swept off her feet at eighteen. Noah has settled within Winden. Elisabeth likes to lie in his bed. She’s fourteen, and growing.

Elisabeth is fourteen when she begins to change both physically and mentally.  


She had earned a few inches in height, and her limbs had developed from being naturally rawboned to nimble and willowy. Her hips had grown by a few inches, but not a lot, and her chest was small enough to still allow her to wear tops without a bra.  


A part of her was subconsciously glad she still had a slither of boyishness to her physicality. She didn’t want to become a young woman just yet. She liked creating childish havoc and being able to get away with it. 

She also couldn’t remember the last time when she felt like a true child; while her body seemed to develop at a snail’s pace, it was as though she had undergone an overnight mental transformation—a silent and ethereal metamorphosis of sorts—and when she woke, her psyche had both risen and died at the same time.

She was the same, but also _wasn’t_ the same. Perhaps everything had been inverted, in some bizarre way. 

Aside from her family, Noah had been one of the quickest to notice Elisabeth’s silent progression into womanhood. She knew he had noticed by the way _he_ had also began to change as a person. 

Even though he already surpassed her physically, Elisabeth could sense with the little intuition she had that the two of them were maturing together within their relationship—in different ways of course, as they were both at different stages of life.

Two years ago, in Elisabeth’s eyes, Noah had been a big-brother figure of sorts. He had been tender and extremely watchful with her. Now, Elisabeth found that he was acting like a juvenile friend more than a character of doting guidance. 

Very infrequently would they find themselves in an intimate situation. But when they did, Noah had the eloquent ability to steer them out of it to the point where his talent blinded Elisabeth from ever realising it had happened. 

On rare occasions Noah’s articulation made Elisabeth forget that he wasn’t a boy her age, nor a “juvenile” friend. He wasn’t the character of guidance she had made up in her head. He wasn’t the big brother figure. He was her mutual and equal in their relationship, yes, but he was also a young adult—one that held an awful lot more experience than she did. 

It didn’t take long for Franziska to find out about Noah. 

A couple of months before, Noah had met Elisabeth outside of school, and Franziska had awkwardly stumbled into them on her way home after a gymnastics class. Elisabeth was sure her cheeks had bloomed roses when her sister’s speculative eyes landed on Noah, glancing him up and down, sizing him up, as though she were prepared to pull out a rifle and shoot him like well-earned game. 

He held the conversation she struck with him surprisingly well, mentioned that he worked at the church, and told her how he and Elisabeth met. Without Franziska’s enquiry he had also said he was seventeen, and studied a part-time philosophy and ethics course outside of Winden.

Elisabeth remembered how she stood between the two that day, her eyes flicking back and forth between them as they spoke. It was like watching a silent film. It was almost frightening how easy Noah found it to lie through his teeth on the spot. She had never seen him do that before. 

Ever since then, Franziska’s natural suspicion over Elisabeth disappeared. Perhaps Noah’s “church-boy” image had eliminated the potential distrust. Eventually, Magnus, Jonas, Bartosz and Martha also became aware of Noah’s existence within Winden. 

“Just wait and see.” Magnus begins, nodding his head at Elisabeth, with a tightly-wound joint settled between his two fingers. He was sprawled on that cushiony abandoned chair, his mental state not really present with the rest of the group. “The second she turns eighteen, that church-boy is gonna sweep her right off her fucking feet, I’m telling you—“

Elisabeth looked down and forced herself not to smile when Franziska had slapped her boyfriend’s leg in disagreement. Magnus had swore, and glanced back at Elisabeth. “Look! She’s smiling! She agrees with me—“

“Stop it.” Franziska says, probably quite loudly, because Magnus suddenly decides to shut his mouth. It was a late summer evening, where the mellow sunlight was still visible at eight o’clock at night. Franziska had invited Elisabeth to sit with the group that night, and Elisabeth had agreed to join. She would have walked through the town to where Noah resided in his lone accommodation any day, but to draw away the eager attention she wanted to give him, she decided to follow her sister’s lead. 

Elisabeth feels a finger prod her shoulder, shortly after Magnus’ outburst. She turns her head to meet Jonas, who was sat beside her within the disordered circle the group had formed. 

“Teach me something.” He says with a small, keen smile. Elisabeth watches his face for an instant, in slight disbelief that he was taking an interest in attempting to humour her. He probably acknowledged that she was the youngest out of them all, and that smoking weed wasn’t one of her pastimes. 

“ _Okay_.” She mouthed back, returning the smile, and goes to cross her legs, and shuffles around in the grass so she was sat facing him. She automatically knew that he wanted to learn more about sign language. She watches him go through what he knew, and she corrected him with some of the basics by repeating a certain gesture back to him. She noticed his attention to stressing what he was saying to her vocally, in order to ensure she grasped every word that was spoken. 

Similarly with Mikkel, Elisabeth felt instantly accepted by Jonas. He was both soft and thoughtful, and it was his unassuming demeanour she gravitated toward to. He reminded her a little of Noah in some way. Although, while they shared some faint qualities, Noah was by far more alluring. Noah had the aloof spirit of a wolf. Jonas was more like a domesticated dog. 

“Can you teach me how to curse?” Bartosz claps a hand on Jonas’ shoulder as he goes to sit down with them, a half empty beer bottle hanging from the tips of his fingers. Elisabeth could smell the distinct aroma of alcohol emit from him. 

“ _Why?_ ” She mouthes back with a silent laugh. Bartosz flicks his eyes to where Magnus was sat. 

“Personal reasons.” He answers, and quirks one corner of his lips. He was doing this on purpose just to be funny, Elisabeth knew. “How do you say, fuck off and—“

Jonas cuts him off. Elisabeth watches him rip at the grass they were sat upon. “You’re drunk.” He says.

Bartosz blinks. “I’m what?”

“Exactly.”

* * *

The residence Noah stayed in was a reconstructed 1920s tavern. A pub was situated on the ground floor alongside the reception office, and a decorative beer-garden occupied the property’s yard. Noah’s room was located on the first floor. It included a small electric cooker and fridge, a bathroom, a double bed, and a battered-looking leather settee Noah figured was between twenty to thirty years old.

Elisabeth had spent countless hours with him in his tenancy across the few years they had known one another. Instead of using the settee, and when they weren’t outside, Elisabeth had sprawled herself across his bed each time she knocked his door. He didn’t seem to mind. He never said anything about it.

A month after she had turned fourteen he was able to get part-time work in the pub downstairs to earn a little more money. Noah ended up taking the majority of night shifts that were available to him (he very quickly realised this wasn’t a good idea) as during the day he was helping out at the church.

During weekends, when Elisabeth spontaneously dropped by, she sometimes found him fast asleep long throughout the afternoon. There had been times where he wouldn’t respond to being heavily poked or prodded; it reflected on how exhausted he was from working late into the small hours of most mornings.

Once, out of impulsive panic, when Elisabeth thought he was genuinely comatose, she had slapped him awake in one violent strike that left him quivering for hours afterward. When he was in the shower, she then decided to make something using the cooker, to compensate for traumatising him.

The pancake mixture had stuck to the pan, and the room very quickly began to smell of smoke, and it wasn’t until Noah came out and panicked did Elisabeth realise she could have set the fire alarm off. He nibbled at a bit of what she’d made once they aired out the room, then doused the rest of the food in sugar and said with a shrug that it wasn’t that bad.

Elisabeth smiles to herself. She stares at the room’s wooden clapboard ceiling as she recalls the fond memory. Noah didn’t find it funny at first, he was actually quite angry when he mentioned she could have started a fire, but weeks later he eventually found it as funny as she did.

She’s laid along the settee when her eyes follow Noah throughout the small room. He had gotten out the shower again, and was dressed in a plain tee and grey sweatpants. She noticed that he never completely dried his hair. He lies down on the bed with a stretch, and after a moment his body stills. He looked like a cat now. The wolf facade had gone to sleep, somewhere.

“You’ve been here an hour. Maybe you should go home.” Noah utters and signs at the same time, when Elisabeth clambers over him and flops onto the other side of the bed.

“ _No_.” She answers. She felt giddy.

He blinks tiredly, and breathes out. He somehow looked more attractive when he was tired. “No?”

“ _I like it here_.” She adds with a warm smile. “ _Let’s play a game. You’ve got cards?_ ”

“I have work later. I need to sleep.”

“ _You slept earlier_.”

They both stare at one another in silence. Elisabeth sucks on her bottom lip, waiting for him to say something else but he doesn’t. He just looks at her. He looks at her with the same observant gaze he held when they first met inside the church. Their first encounter suddenly felt like a lifetime ago.

Noah shuts his eyes then, sighs, and buried half his face into the crook of his elbow. Elisabeth swallowed.

She let her eyes wander down the expanse of his exposed neck. The hair along his forearms had been lightened by the summer sun. It was then she noticed that his frame wasn’t as big as she thought it was. He wasn’t skinny, but he was lean. His shoulders were arguably dainty for a man his age, though perhaps that was because he still had a few years left of growing to do.

For a fraction of a second, she wondered what he would look like in the shower, under the running water, and rapt within his own state of mind. She mulled over whether the droplets would sit against his skin, or continuously roll down his body. Glassy minuscule beads would hang from his lashes, and turn into tears when he blinks. He would purse his lips and shut his eyes, and tip his head back—

_ Stop. _

Elisabeth’s heart raced.

_Don’t go there._

Noah opened his eyes.

Her reeling, runaway train of thought had vanished into thin air.

“ _Can I hold you?_ ” He signs.

“ _Why?_ ” She replies. She would have obliged right then and there to his request if it hadn’t been for her stupid curiosity.

”I can feel you staring at me.” He blurts. “It’s fucking creepy.”

Elisabeth fights the urge to burst into laughter. She wanted to be swallowed up by the bed at the same time. “ _I’m sorry_.”

“You really aren’t.”

She presses her lips together to suppress her amusement, but ends up sniggering. When he doesn’t react she shuffles closer, like he asked, and evades from making eye contact with him. She presses her forehead against his chest and feels him wrap an around her shoulders. They lay together for a minute, both content with the other, but just as she felt Noah relax and close his eyes again, Elisabeth started to squirm.

At first, she pressed into him until all she could smell was the washing detergent he used for his clothes, but then began to move her legs and knees. The annoying movement hadn’t disturbed Noah, but a second later his whole body tensed. Elisabeth thought nothing of it, and laid with her eyes wide open. She enjoyed the physicality. It was another form of communication. She believed intimacy came in several designs, not just one.

She moves for a second time, out of sudden discomfort, and feels a subtle change in Noah’s breathing. She wanted to roll over but felt locked under his hold. On the third time, she pushes one knee against some part of his body, and he suddenly goes to pluck her off him.

“ _Stop it._ ” He signs. She wasn’t really paying attention to what he was saying. Her eyes were locked on his face. His cheeks were tinged pink.

_Why is he embarrassed?_ She thinks, then asks, “ _Stop what?_ ”

Noah props himself up on his elbows with a grunt. She watches the bones in his shoulders move under the t-shirt he wore as the bed dips, and then he’s sat with his back against her.

“You’re being cruel.” He adds, reluctantly turning halfway to respond.

Now that made no sense. She didn’t understand what he was saying, or what he was referring to, or what he was implying. She had let him hold her, and she had held him, all she did was move a little and—

—oh.

_ Oh. _

The penny dropped within her head, and she would have broken down into laughter if it weren’t for how stoic and unamused Noah looked. He seemed to be teetering on the brink of frustration. Elisabeth wasn’t fully aware of how the male body worked. She was equipped with her own, of course, but the world of the opposite sex was like an entire different plain in her head. Perhaps, in all ways, boys were secretly more sensitive than girls.

“ _Can I see it?_ ” Elisabeth asks.

Noah’s eyes widened in horror. “What—No!”

“ _Why not? It’s just a body_.”

“It’s  _ my _ body.”

“ _I’d show you mine_.”

“We are _not_ having this conversation.” Noah’s gestures were quick, hard and heavy, and the tips of his ears were burning red once again. Elisabeth rolls her eyes. 

This was how it always played out. She was sure they both wanted the same things, but Noah was always the first to cut the potential of anything different from happening.

But he had kissed back, that day, in the cave. That was part of the promise— _whatever the promise was_. The kiss had sealed the commitment— _whatever the commitment was_. Every time she asked something suggestive or intimate he would automatically shut down.

“ _What does it feel like, then?_ ” Elisabeth says. Noah glances at her, and she expects her question to hammer the final nail into the coffin for sending him on his way to an outburst, but to her mild surprise that doesn’t happen.

“It’s like being stabbed with a knife.” Noah replies flatly. He was being stupid now. “And you’re refusing to pull it out of me. You keep pushing it further inside.”

If it was a game he wanted to play, she was happy to humour him. “ _Technically, the knife is keeping you alive. If I take it out you’d die from the blood loss—pretend it’s the apocalypse. There’s no ambulances, or doctors. You need the knife. If you want to live._ ”

Noah turns around on the bed, and Elisabeth can see the smallest of smiles plastered on his face. Then, completely off-topic and a moment too long afterward, he signs with gentle, soft-spoken hands. “ _I would burn the world for you._ ”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth is confronted with her first feeling of desire, and Noah is unsure of whether to indulge in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note of caution: please refer to the tags before continuing to read, I tried to make this as realistic as possible. Hope you enjoy :)

“You can have this.”

Elisabeth’s eyes settle on the little black tube that sat in her sister’s outstretched palm. 

After annoying Noah and almost giving him a hard-on, Elisabeth decided to leave him alone for the rest of the day. She quickly found herself sat with her sister, who was sifting through some of her old makeup.

“ _What is it?_ ” Elisabeth asks. Franziska pulls the cap off the tube to reveal a near-as-new lipstick. The colour of it was a vivid, rosy, sugary blush.

“Martha got it for me,” she explains, and hands it to Elisabeth. “I think I only used it once, but I don’t like the colour. It would look better on you.”

Elisabeth twists the slanted stub upward to see its expanse, then twists it down again, and pops the cap back on. She rarely shared these kind of moments with her sister. But when they did, an unconditional love surfaced and eliminated all previous conflict between them. She had wondered if their relationship was enduring a constant cycle of rebirth that was set into motion every time they happened to be on good terms with one another.

“ _Thank you_.” Elisabeth says with a grin, and wraps her arms around Franziska. She could smell a hint of vanilla woven throughout her sister’s silky auburn hair, and an undertone of something faintly masculine—Magnus, probably.

For a faint, involuntary instant, Elisabeth wondered if a fragment of Noah lingered on her hair and skin too. A quiet, unassuming part of her longed to have the intimacy that her sister shared with Magnus. She wanted to feel that kind of intimacy with Noah.

The next day was a Sunday when she planned to see him again.

His schedule had always been flexible, so that allowed her to visit him any time she wanted. During weekdays she stayed at home often, but only because of school, and to keep her parents at an arm’s length.

Peter had asked her a few times where she ran off to during most weekends. Elisabeth shrugged in response, and swallowed down the dreaded anxiety of being exposed. She said that she and Mikkel liked exploring around the forest, and that she was beginning to teach Jonas some sign language. Her excuse appeased her father. But when she left the house, she came to terms with the many lies she had began to feed her parents, including Franziska and her friendship group.

A stab of guilt plagued Elisabeth’s gut. Why was she lying? There really was no big secret. She felt as though she was covering up multiple traces of a nonexistent murder.

Noah…was just Noah.

He was no different to the likes of Jonas, or Magnus, or Bartosz. He was only a few years older than they were, and he could still pass as being seventeen due to his fine physicality. 

Elisabeth tried to picture herself telling her father she had met a boy outside of school, and that she liked him, and that he liked her. Peter would be somewhat suspicious at first, including Charlotte, but maybe every father and mother was like that. That kind of psyche is automatically adopted when you come to rear children. Being protective was an instinct, a priority—and a normality.

Although, despite how much she wanted to imagine a peaceful world where nothing like that mattered, she knew without a doubt if everyone was told of the true reality, she would be torn away from Noah in a heartbeat.

Elisabeth swallows. She forces her intrusive thoughts out of sight and out of mind. She didn’t want to let the things that hadn’t happened ruin the present. It was a waste of mental energy she didn’t have. 

She felt the comforting warmth of the sun hit the back of her neck when she reached the tavern. She had tied her hair into a bun. A few stray hairs bobbed as she walked. She was wearing the lipstick Franziska had given her yesterday, and felt a year or two older than what she was. She wore a pair of cut-off denim shorts and the charcoal-coloured sweater Noah had given her. It didn’t smell of him anymore. It instead materialised the girlish scent of her own body.

She raps her knuckles against his door, and when he opens it he smiles, and to her internal glee, he points out the lipstick.

“I like this,” Noah says, and she feels her heart pound when he goes to brush her bottom lip with the face of his thumb. She feels fuzzy and warm with his three words—until he continues. He cups her small face and squeezes her cheeks. “It makes you look less of an animal-child.”

Elisabeth swats his hand away from her when he says that, and he has the gall to grin at her when she glares at him. His aloof confidence sent a jolt of inexplicable fascination to her gut.

“ _I thought you were going to be nice about it_.” She signs.

“I was.” He answers flatly. 

“ _Animal-child? Really?_ ”

She watches him bite his bottom lip, and his eyes briefly flit her up and down. She recognised that gaze—it was similar to the one Franziska had held against him when they first met. For those few fleeting seconds, Franziska embodied the qualities of an unforgiving huntress that day. Noah had stood seemingly submissive, and she had believed him.

It was only now, stood in his room, inches apart from kissing him, did Elisabeth become aware of how Noah mirrored an unpredictable, almost predatory nature—one that she was unsure if she wanted to catch a glimpse of. For some strange unexplained reason, it made the animalistic side of her want to trek further into his territory, and jab him with affection until his bubbling arousal came to bite her back.

“ _Sorry_.” Noah signs, and she blinks herself out of her thoughts. “ _I meant to say you’re stunning_.”

She smiles at that, and his face softens in return. His mildly hungry gaze had vanished, and then, the initial tension that was there before reversed into nothing, until it felt like it hadn’t even occurred. 

* * *

She remembered her thoughts exactly before she left the house.

She looked at herself in the mirror, and quietly admired how her body was stood exactly at the crossroads of becoming a young woman.

At the same time, the boyishness she had been born with clung to her bones. She was initially unhappy about it, said that it didn’t make her look pretty, but then Noah made a comment to her one day in the forest, saying she was otherworldly. He said she was like both boy and girl combined, and that it was a rarity to experience having that physicality, even if it would only last several months.

Hell had been the beginning of her bodily development. It was only logical that Heaven should become the end.

Elisabeth had pulled the sweatshirt over the top of her head. She remembers feeling the thrill of the unknown to come. The texture of the fabric alone against her skin made her shudder. Noah had made the inner material bobbly and slightly rough, likely from prolonged use and harsh washing.

Maybe it was just the hormones and the wrath of having to deal with oestrogen, and the fact that her period had ended two days before and she couldn’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to be underneath someone— _maybe being given the lipstick suddenly made her think she knew what she was doing, and that being fourteen was just a fucking shit-storm of all sorts_ —but she knew for sure that she was beginning to dip her toes in something that was a little more than just a teen-girl fantasy.

She feels Noah’s fingers tickle her arm. Elisabeth tries not to smile.

He sometimes, and only sometimes, agreed to lie beside her in his bed. It was how they made conversation with one another.

“Are you ticklish?” Noah inquires.

_We’ve been here before_ , Elisabeth thinks. 

“ _No_.” She signs, and watches with amusement how he uses the tip of his index finger to draw a picture against her skin. She catches him swallow.

His face changes a little, as if he had thought of something mildly upsetting, but then his eyes light up, and he suddenly goes to attack her neck with his lips, and his hands dart to her sides, and even though she can’t hear herself hysterically laughing, she can feel herself fighting against him while the ecstasy of it all drowns her heart.

They playfully grapple until they’re entangled in one another, and just as Elisabeth throws her head back to breathe, the innocence of the situation flips in an instant—when she felt Noah spread his fingers across her naked abdomen.

She’s certain her gut plummets right past her groin at his touch, and it’s the first time she confronts the feeling of genuine arousal. Her heart thuds against her chest. It sends tremors across her shoulders and projects ripples down to the end of her spine.

Elisabeth catches Noah’s gaze, and he’s torn across a look of desperation and shock.

“You’re—not wearing anything underneath this.” He blurts, and his cheeks suddenly bloom pink in a realisation that made Elisabeth feel powerful.

He suddenly seemed incredibly vulnerable, as if he had just been hammered to the ground and forced to kneel before both his morals and emotions.

She kisses him hard, then. She feels him gasp against her lips. It’s a physical invitation of sorts, and Noah immediately accepts it.

Elisabeth feels his hand glide further under her sweatshirt— _his_ sweatshirt—until his slim fingers are caressing her breast, and he’s pressing against her little by little with his weight, his desire being measured by his every flailing moment of need.

Elisabeth could practically feel the hesitancy radiate from his hot skin. It’s only then does she roll over with all her strength until she’s straddling him, thighs clenching at his hips. The suddenness of her action nearly puts the fear of God into him, and it’s his shock that fuels her excitement.

“Wait—” He gasps in a single breath as she kisses him again.

She goes to take off her sweatshirt, but his fingers claw at her own to do the opposite, and she’s unsure why but not fully aware of what he was trying to tell her. Neither of them were fully aware of what was going on. The whole thing felt like a runaway train heading for a dead end. It felt like the suffering of a fox that had been caught by the hunter’s hound, it’s body going limp when familiar teeth hit that one particular nerve under its ruff.

Noah eventually gives up. Elisabeth pulls off the sweater. Her hair was tousled, and the neat bun she had spent time in tying had dropped to the nape of her neck.

Noah blinks. He swallows. A fear Elisabeth was blind to settles within his hooded eyes as he absorbs her nakedness, and as she leans forward on him, she slips the tips of her fingers under the waistband of his sweatpants, and his stomach dips at her gentleness—but she’s flipped over onto her back in less than a second before anything more intimate has the chance to be birthed into the present.

Elisabeth squeaks when Noah slams her body into the mattress, and she feels him yank the bedsheets across the top half of her body.

The arousal vanishes between them in that moment.

The previous want and desire had been stabbed to what Elisabeth refused to believe was nothingness—or perhaps it was _forced_ nothingness, on Noah’s side at least. He had been the one to both initiate and abruptly end the spectacle.

_And why?_

Elisabeth lies in thought with the sheets cloaking her body. She stares at the ceiling. She’s muddled between everything and is unsure of what to think, say and feel. She’s far and beyond the normal state of confusion. There was nothing but numbness in her bones, and possibly a long, relentless, agonising delayed reaction jammed in the process of creation.

Her eyes slowly loll to Noah, who was sat with his back to her.  


She reluctantly wanted to reach out and draw an invisible picture on his skin too, and see if he was ticklish as she was. A gentle, silent ache of melancholy rubs her in the chest when he turns around, his demeanour awfully indecisive.

“ _I’m—I’m sorry_.” He signs.

The silence between them felt suffocating. It had never been like this before.

“ _I just couldn’t_.” He adds. 

Elisabeth could hardly think. She didn’t know what to feel, or _how_ to feel. Although, she knew she felt mentally faint, as though she were having an out-of-body-experience.

Finally, with a chink of confidence, and what she assumed was his attempt of producing an olive branch (or trying to milk blood from a stone) Noah comes to the conclusion that Elisabeth was in denial of hearing from the very start:

“You’re not old enough for this.” 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They make it up, very gently, but Elisabeth finds herself in a more traumatic situation shortly after.

_This is emotional agony_ , she thinks, three days later, bewildered and confused but somehow not overly hurt by Noah’s series of reactions (which was arguably ironic). Reverse psychology, possibly. How could you not be hurt by someone who had agreed to toy with you, and then withdrew almost instantly, all the while making _you_ —the participant—look like the instigator?

Elisabeth tried to replace ‘agony’ with ‘dejection’ but it didn’t seem to equal the  anguish inside her head. She thought about it again, and tried to find another word, and finally settled on the fact that she was being over-dramatic but still wasn’t sure what to think of the whole thing. Maybe she didn’t need to think. Maybe it wasn’t her job to think. Maybe it was _Noah’s_ job. 

She didn’t return to the tavern after the incident. She was afraid to, and she felt stupid for feeling afraid. Noah wasn’t really the problem—it was what occurred between them was the problem. The fuel that lit the fire to the sudden divide made Elisabeth wonder if it had been her that caused him to shutdown. She thought her innocent interest in intimacy made him recoil enough, but _this_ —this made Noah disengage completely, as though he had glissaded into a different world entirely, one where she ceased to exist. 

When he refused to continue what she thought was initially child’s play, she had pulled on the sweatshirt, slipped her feet into her shoes and left the room. They exchanged no words, nor looks. When she got home she felt as though she had left a piece of herself in his room, in his bed, and in his hands. She had been tempted to run back and persuade him that nothing ever happened. 

She catches a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror as she floats down the corridor to her bedroom, and acknowledges the atom of Franziska’s sleeping fortitude that was set like stone within her pale green eyes. 

Her gut plunged with horror when she saw how disheveled her hair had become, and that the pink lipstick she had put on was flippantly smeared across her upper lip. She was puzzled as to how she didn’t receive any questioning looks from the few people she passed on her way home. She had also wandered into the house through the backdoor, unnoticed by her father who was sat in the living room leafing through what she assumed had been a novel. 

Perhaps everyone in the world was too rapt within their own problems to pay attention to a girl that knew nothing of what was real and what wasn’t. Elisabethinterpreted it as a sign of some sort, and the naive fraction of her psyche thought this recent issue with Noah wasn’t going to be a huge problem. 

Elisabeth had stared at herself long and hard. She remembered how she felt before she left to see him. It had been the polar opposite to how she felt now. The way she now physically looked had been materialised by the current inner torment she quietly wrestled with. 

She suddenly didn’t look like a girl anymore. She didn’t look like the spiritual being Noah had described as otherworldly. She looked like a human woman—and the little voice in her head screamed: _I fucking hate it._

_This is not what I wanted_ , she thinks.

* * *

It takes Elisabeth a week to muster a molecule of courage to step out of her emotional husk and confront Noah. After seeing him nearly every other day for more than two years, spending the ordinary length of seven days without him felt like a lifetime to her. 

She finds Noah in the church, and she’s overwhelmed with a weighty sense of Deja-vu. 

It’s mid-afternoon when she pushes open the wooden doors and she quickly found herself reliving the day they had met, though there was no rain and soaked clothes this time. Noah had been sweeping the stone floors when Elisabeth stepped into the church, and as the doors shut with a muted echo he lifted his head, and their eyes locked. 

Noah blinks. He jerks his head a little, to rid the lock of dirty blond hair that hung across one of his eyes. Elisabeth watches him set the floor brush aside, and she’s the one to approach him this time. 

“ _It’s my fault_.” Noah signs, when they’re stood a metre apart. He seemed pensive. “ _I shouldn’t have encouraged you_.”

“ _But we both want the same thing_.” Elisabeth replies. “ _It doesn’t matter_.”

“Yes, it does.” He comes closer to her, until she has to tip her head up to keep their gazes aligned. “I’m the adult in our relationship,” Noah explains. “You’re still a child.”

“ _I’m not a child_.” She shoots back, and then picked up on the irony of her response. A child would be inclined to say the exact same thing. Noah dismissed her answer however, and continued. 

“Look at your sister,” he says, and even though she couldn’t hear him, she could distinguish the softness in his voice through the way his lips produced the words. “ _And Magnus_ ,” He adds, signing. “Look at Jonas, and his girlfriend, Martha. Tell me—what is the difference between us, and them?”

Elisabeth felt like a student being held under a gentle, yet dominating sort of authority. Noah’s approach of making her understand the situation was similar to that of how a teacher would explain an equation. It made her realise how unbalanced they actually were, in terms of being equals—there would be infrequent times where they would seesaw between their roles. 

_ We would become wonderfully turbulent,  _ she thinks, mentally absent.

Noah waits for her to answer. Her eyes falter from his when the lightbulb in her head fizzles to life, and she feels even more juvenile. 

“ _Similar age_.” She signs, her gestures reluctant and slightly stubborn. A tender, empathetic smile begins to show at the corners of Noah’s lips. She didn’t know if she liked that kind of smile. She envied him for having such a way of dealing with problems such as this. 

“Do you understand?” Noah adds.  


Elisabeth nods, and looks away from him disappointedly. His hands settle at the sides of her shoulders. She felt like lunging into him. She hoped, in her head, that he would embrace her back if she did, with the same force and desire to disengage from the conversation. She wanted to pretend they weren’t discussing this at all.

“When you’re a little older, maybe,” Noah says, when she doesn’t respond. She feels his thumbs rub little circles at her shoulders. It felt nice. It reminded her of when Charlotte would kiss her forehead before she shut her eyes. 

“ _What if it happens before that?_ ” Elisabeth asks. They both seemed to agree on the fact that, neither of them seemed to have control over what was happening. A look of instinctive disagreement crosses his face. 

She watches how Noah’s pupils narrow to the size of pin-pricks, and feels him latch onto her soul with his seemingly tame, yet fixated stare—and it’s both emotionally and physically overwhelming. He stops rubbing the little circles into her skin, and she tenses. 

“Only God knows what can happen between now and then.” He says, and his hands fall from her shoulders. His face softened, and he smiled lightly before signing his next few words. “ _But I have loved you forever._ ”

* * *

They made it up very gently, after that.

Elisabeth was sure the mild wound they created had healed, but every so often one of the figurative stitches would come undone, and the previous hurt would still be there. Elisabeth would watch Noah hide it when it refused to leave him alone. She reckoned he was still grappling with the issue inside his head, though not vocally confirming it to her. His thoughts were scribbled into his face, and his feelings swam within the shallows of his glacial eyes.

She had a dream, one night, following Noah’s drawling aloofness.

He had been the centrepiece of her dream.

She remembers him as the spectre that passed her side three years ago, body wiry with hushed strength and an observant, authoritative gaze, dressed and prepared for the end of the world—and for the end of time.

She feels the phantom pain of rope at her elbows and wrists, and Noah’s presence becomes distant within her dream. She’s sat on a bed, within what looked like a trailer. There’s foreign fingers touching her naked side, and then she’s slammed into the mattress—it felt familiar, but it wasn’t, because it wasn’t _Noah_ —and she hears the clack of a belt buckle, or what was meant to sound like a buckle. She could _hear_. The reality of the simulation was piecing together too quickly for her to follow. She was barely keeping her head above the water.

When she feels the rope loosen, she slips away from the bed like liquid, screaming at the phantom pain of having her hair yanked by her attacker, and she bursts through the little door of the trailer and stumbles onto cold ground.

Elisabeth looks up to find Noah stood before her.

He steps forward. His hair is wet, and his skin was slathered with the rocky muck from the caves. His eyes are tired. He looks unusually gaunt. Everything felt awfully somber, and when Elisabeth absorbed her surroundings she realised the world she loved had been completely obliterated.

Time stopped.

But then, gradually and painfully, everything began to reverse.

The grey, stannic-smelling rain drew from the ground with unsettling ease, and Noah stepped back, and Elisabeth withdrew from her stumble, and panic thrusts through her chest.  


She was going to be forced back into the trailer. Noah was going to vanish. The process was inevitable. It had all been predetermined. 

She feels the foreign hands grapple at her waist, and then her chest, and then the rope slithers back around her body and squeezes until it burns her skin raw—and Noah does nothing, as the little door begins to shut, and she’s liquid once again.

A broken acceptance settles within Elisabeth. It feels like being beaten into a coma. Voiceless words emit from her mouth: 

_ You were never really here— _

—and she wakes, before Noah has the chance to completely vanish, and she opens her eyes to meet her darkened bedroom ceiling. Breathless and shuddering, she swings her legs out of the bed and feels the solid floorboards meet her bare heels. _This is real_. A heavy, suffocating absence bloomed within her chest. _I’m real_. Her gut flipped. _Everything is real_. Her head swam. She felt as though she was still half stuck in the dream—or in the nightmare.

She suddenly receives the most bizarre, obsessive, impulsive thought: what if the nightmare had spoke blatant truth? Despite how stupid and delusional it sounded, she felt as though the bad experience embodied some kind of present reality. 

Elisabeth sits up in her bed, high and dry. Her fingers clench at the bedsheets with anxiety. Her heart thuds behind her chest, encouraging her intuition to spiral. Noah’s emotional distance finally made sense to her, now.

_He’s going to leave_ , she thinks. 

* * *

Time doesn’t feel real when Elisabeth steps outside her house.

The air was still, and cool against her bare skin. The sky was tinged a moody, early-morning blue. When she woke with a body pumped full with adrenaline, she automatically padded across Franziska’s bedroom, went down the stairs, and slid out the backdoor, and began to run, headed for the tavern.

The street was soothingly empty. It was surreal, as though she were the only being that existed. The pavement rolled beneath her feet as she paced herself. The young air hit the back of her throat and punched at her lungs when she stopped to breathe. She reached the accommodation minutes later, and pushed open the doors of the reception office. A small study lamp was lit, but no one was sat at the desk. Elisabeth shot past the office and to the staircase, and within moments she was stood outside Noah’s room, unforgivingly banging both her fists against his door, unaware he probably wasn’t the only tenant that resided within the same corridor. 

The door opens rather abruptly, and Noah is stood disheveled and half-naked. He squints, and rubs one palm against his right eye, blinking. He’s about to say something until Elisabeth darts forward to squeeze him, and she presses her face against his bare chest. He loses his balance for an instant, and he slams one hand into the door to keep himself steady.His skin was hot and damp at her lips. He was warm and alive all over, despite his exhausted, staggering exterior.

Noah’s heart thumped, but then skipped when Elisabeth felt his arms curl round her, and he squeezes back. His embrace was delicately protective—and was quite literally real.

_He’s here_ , she thinks, her panic subsiding. _He’s here._

Noah pries her off him a moment later, and he cups her face. His fingers felt firm against her cheeks. She notices the dark circles that hung beneath his sleepy eyes, and somehow, in defiance of his appearance he has the energy to ask, “What happened? Are you okay?”

Elisabeth felt like melting to the floor in his arms. Reality came rushing back to her. Noah hadn’t left. He hadn’t left at all.

_ God, this is so stupid. _

“ _I—had a nightmare_ ,” Elisabeth says, swallowing hard, and remembers the horrible figments of being assaulted. It had been awful, and she still couldn’t process what had happened. She hoped he couldn’t see her hands shudder as she signed. The corridor was dark enough, apart from the warm, mellow lamplight that flooded through Noah’s open door.

“ _That you left_.” She continues. “ _That you left here. For good_.” She then became aware of how vague her explanation sounded. “ _I’m sorry_.”

Noah hadn’t really been listening to her. His attention was placed elsewhere, and Elisabeth followed his eyes to where he was staring.

She glanced down, and noticed her bare feet. The skin around her toes had been grazed by the concrete she walked upon, and the dark, powdery grime from the streets and roads stuck to her skin. There was some blood. She feels the cold cling to her bare shoulders, and her knees, and then her naked thighs—she had ran out of the house wearing nothing but a near-translucent tank top and a pair of cotton shorts.

Noah’s thumbs circled her cheekbones. His tired, weary smile was unusually affectionate.

“Wild girl.” He merely says, unaffected by her intrusion, and pulls her into the yellow light of his room. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noah takes care of Elisabeth—until their tranquility is disrupted by a familiar person.

“You must really like me if you ran all this way without stopping,” Noah begins, once Elisabeth had revisited the vital parts of her dream in order to explain it to him. “At five in the morning, too. That’s commitment.”

She smiles a little at his gentle attempt of lightening her mood. 

The room was warm and familiar when Noah had ushered Elisabeth inside, and the remnants of the dream had faltered away from her both mentally and physically when he placed an attentive, delicate hand at the back of her neck. 

His room was messier than usual, and it reminded her that he was full of youth, too. She saw how his parka jacket had been hung across the back of the settee, alongside a few other items of clothing. His boots lay unlaced beside a pair of canvas plimsolls, and his open rucksack was slumped beside the door. A crudely folded map stuck out at the top of it, and she could make out a dog-eared box of paracetamol poke out from one of the side pockets. 

Elisabeth glanced across the room to where his bed was—a pillow was on the floor—and saw that several drawers within the dresser had been opened. Noah’s way of living demonstrated how unsettled he could be, even within a place that Elisabeth assumed he was semi-permanently living in. 

Noah guided her into the bathroom. The soles of her feet felt bruised and wounded when she stepped along the cool tiled floor. He told her she should shower, and she had instantly grimaced at his suggestion. She didn’t feel like putting her head under running water at five in the morning. The adrenaline had fled from her body, and now she just wanted to melt down into nothing. Noah said she didn’t have to wash her hair, that he didn’t own a hairdryer. 

“Think of it as a spiritual cleansing.” Noah says, as he pats his hands around a towel, checking if it was damp. He had set aside one of his t-shirts for her to put on afterward. He yawns, and Elisabeth catches a glimpse of his ivory canines. The bathroom light made his teeth glisten. She wondered whether he would be the same person if he was a vampire, or a wolf. 

“Imagine the water washing away all the bad stuff that happened to you in your dream. You’ll feel better,” Noah stops and points to her narrow, grazed bare feet, and signs. “ _I’ll help you with that afterward. I have some plasters_.”

Elisabeth looks up at him. Noah blinks and waits for her to say something. But there was nothing to say. Several seconds later he swallows, gestures to the shower once more, and then turns to leave—awkwardly knocking his head off the side of the door on his way out. 

* * *

She had gotten out of the shower feeling incredibly self-conscious, aware that they were in such close proximity, despite being in separate rooms. Elisabeth had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror once she stepped out of the shower, and studied how some water droplets still clung to her body and refused to slide down into nothingness. 

The bright, near-white light of the bathroom made her skin look opalescent, and the trapped humidity within the small space made her feel unusually ethereal. The primitive segment of her conscience felt like opening the bathroom door, and she envisioned Noah stood, wild-eyed and ravenous for something pristine and celibate such as herself. 

Elisabeth quivered. She tore her eyes away from the mirror and grabbed the towel without another thought, half-ashamed and half-enticed all at once by the unpredicted fantasy. 

It was only now that she decided to acknowledge the callow, borderline-destructive nature that sat clawing under the weight of her morals. She realised she wanted Noah in every way possible. She didn’t just want the kind, creamy, affectionate love—she wanted him at his worst, at his most inferior, and at his most calamitous. She wanted him stripped back and rough around the edges. He would look beautiful and unforgiving without warning. She wanted him when he was ripping up the warpath, and when he was starving for unsophisticated, testosterone-charged sex. 

Elisabeth wanted a nibble of every little individual segment that made Noah into who he was. 

_I want you_ , she thinks, when she’s sat on the end of his unmade bed, oblivious to the fact that she had been feeling like her fourteen-year-old self, and wasn’t entertaining the fantasy of being older than what she actually was. 

She watches how Noah opens up a small, minimal first aid kit, his hair falling across his eyes as he lowered his head to sift through the kit’s contents. Elisabeth swallows. She could feel the ghost of her body reach out and thread her fingers through his hair. 

Noah is knelt on the floor before her as though he were tying her invisible shoelaces, but instead was tending to the meagre harm she had inflicted onto herself. He gets up momentarily and rummages through his chest of drawers, until she sees him lift out a pair of scissors. He sits down this time, and crosses his legs, and begins to cut the plasters he had chosen to their required size. 

Elisabeth felt overwhelmed. _I want you_. She became her own worst enemy in these kind of situations. _So much_. She was to blame for her own hype.

Noah glances up to meet her face, and he smiles. The faintest indentation of dimples showed at either side of his hollow cheeks. 

She then feels the grazed skin along her feet numb, and watches Noah dab antiseptic cream onto each minuscule wound with his middle finger. He goes to lift one of the neatly cut plasters, and begins to patch up the damage, bit by bit until he was finished, his movements alarmingly swift. He was careful not to touch her, and the stupid, childish part of her didn’t like that.

Elisabeth glances to his bedside table. A little gold crucifix pendant hung from the neck of the lamp. It glittered against the mellow light. Noah’s fingers rest at her knee, and she looks down at him. 

“Don’t do that again,” He says. “Okay?”

Elisabeth nods. 

She pulls her hair to one side, and continues to squeeze the ends of it with the towel she used for her body. The hair tie she found in her short’s pocket had broke in the shower. 

Noah zips up the first aid kit and puts it away. As he stands, Elisabeth takes in his physicality for what felt like the hundredth time, and each time she went back to study him she never got bored. She became even more curious. 

Noah had been blessed with natural, unrefined muscle, and his skin looked visibly thin against the angular points of his skeleton. His body was similar to that of a taut, agile racehorse. A fine, maintained strip of abdominal hair trailed down from his navel and past under the waistband of his sweatpants. 

Elisabeth watches him pull a t-shirt over the top of his head, and he runs a hand through his hair, brushing away the length from his eyes before sitting down beside her—his thigh pressing against hers. She turns her head to him, the rest of the morning stiffness fleeing her body, and her lips part instinctively. His Adam’s Apple bobs once, and she’s desperate to kiss him, until his head jerks to one side, startled by something foreign. 

Elisabeth follows his eyes to the door. Someone had knocked. 

She watches him get up to open it, and within seconds he’s forcefully pushed aside by a familiar figure—and the hairs on the back of Elisabeth’s neck stand erect with dread and realisation. 

Franziska stood wide-eyed and breathless, her eyes darting around the room. She was dressed in her pyjamas and had thrown on the denim jacket Magnus had bought for her. She was clutching one of her canvas shoulder bags by its strap. When her eyes land on Elisabeth, an innate, sisterly reflex kicks into her system. Elisabeth is certain her sister was about to turn on her heel and sock Noah across his jaw, but for some miraculous reason she doesn’t act on her impulses. Instead, Franziska strides up to her younger sister and pulls her up from the bed in a single yank. Elisabeth winces. 

“Why the fuck is your hair wet?” Franziska inquires, her words heavy like unforgiving artillery. 

“ _I had a shower_.” Elisabeth answers, and immediately perceived with deep, instant regret how that one-lined response would make Noah look. It was too late to rephrase. The scene looked terribly questionable, and it implied a lot, even though those implications meant nothing, but that didn’t rule out how _bad_ it looked from an outsider’s perspective. 

Franziska’s eyes narrowed with a lethality that had never before surfaced. 

“You _what_?” She repeats, though Elisabeth couldn’t fully decipher what she said, because she had spoke through clenched teeth. She drops the bag between them, and it hit the floorboards with a clunk. “ _Get up_.” She signs, her gestures sharp. “ _I brought you shoes. And a coat_.”

Without hesitation and in fear of being slapped, Elisabeth opens the bag and takes out her boots, gingerly slipping her sore feet into them and half-ties the laces, before pulling on the coat that had been bunched at the bottom of the bag. Out of her periphery, she sees Noah approach Franziska with an unprecedented grit. 

“Elisabeth came to me,” He says warily. “I didn’t bring her here against her will.”

“ _Fuck_ you,” Franziska snaps, her expressions poisonous. “I don’t even know you. I could have you arrested—you might be lying about your age, for all I know. Hanging around my kid-sister will get you into prison,” she turns to Elisabeth, grabs her by the arm and pulls her close as though they were mother and daughter. Elisabeth felt like they were impersonating a feminist duo of sorts—ready to eliminate anything that was remotely misogynistic. It felt like a comedy sketch. She wondered why she hadn’t started laughing yet out of pure anxiety. 

She’s torn across the room then, and she nearly stumbles into her sister. “You better watch yourself, Noah,” Franziska warns, her eyes alight with simmering fury. “Winden is a small fucking town. Remember that.”

Just as she’s dragged out of the room, Elisabeth whips her head back to Noah, her blonde hair bouncing, and she shoots him an apologetic look that said: _I’m sorry._

Undeterred by the wad of verbal abuse he just received, he was able to smile.

“ _It’s okay_.” He mouths back, seconds before Franziska slams the door behind them. 

* * *

For a moment, and for a moment only, Elisabeth almost enjoyed the attention Franziska had spewed out like venom for her. Of course, if she had a choice, this wasn’t the kind of attention she wanted; it was the exact kind she had wanted to avoid because of Noah’s presence, but now that it had happened, it didn’t really matter—it was attention nonetheless.

A backlog of childhood memories triggered Elisabeth to slip down into one of her many memory lanes as they walked in silence, under the fading, deep blue of the morning sky.

She had been the one that liked to pick up the bugs they encountered during their family walks in the woods. Franziska was the one that liked to pick up the flowers and pinecones. When they argued, Elisabeth was the one that used to listen, and scream with her eyes. Franziska used to scream with her voice. Elisabeth was the one that used to love the thrill of being backed into a corner, laughing hysterically once they had ran circles around the house chasing one another with Peter’s thumbtacks—while Franziska pressed the pin into Elisabeth’s plush, seven-year-old skin, but never once drawing blood. Elisabeth had always done the opposite when she was the one running after her sister with the thumbtack.

There had always been a natural divide between them. A contrast of sorts, that always seemed to individualise them at the very last moment—the moment where they thought they were the same, after all, and that they were true sisters, and that they shared the same psyche and projected altruism to one another unconditionally.

And now, after years of attempting to catch the feeling, it had finally happened. 

Elisabeth had never seen Franziska behave like this in her life. Not once had it occurred. The experience was new, like tasting a new food, and she was unsure whether or not she liked it—so she kept chewing, letting the idea turn and turn within her mind’s mouth until she could taste no more.

“ _How did you find me?_ ” Was the first thing she asked, minutes after they had abandoned Noah. Elisabeth had been trailing in Franziska’s brisk, silently angry footsteps.

“I followed you.” Franziska answered with a single glance.

“ _How?_ ”

“You woke me up when you passed my bedroom. I looked out my window and saw you stood at the back of the house like a little—” she pauses and purses her lips, scrunches her nose, and tries to find the words amidst whatever else she was grappling at within her, “—like the little skinny delinquent-brat you are, then you ran off barefoot and near enough naked like a lunatic.”

Elisabeth didn’t catch the last few words. Her sister spoke too quickly. She doesn’t bother asking her again, in case she got flicked across the temple.

“ _Are you going to tell Mom?_ ”

“I don’t think Mom will care, especially with everything else that’s going on.“ Franziska says.

Elisabeth blinked. She didn’t understand. If Charlotte knew about Noah— _Christ_ , it would not be pretty. “ _What do you mean?_ ”

“She’s in denial over Dad having an affair for the last two years, what else?”

Elisabeth stopped walking.

Her breath catches in her throat.

She felt like her lungs had been wrenched straight from her chest.

_ What? _

Franziska slowly stops in her tracks, once she could no longer hear the gentle thud-thud of Elisabeth’s boots emit from behind her. She turns around questioningly.

Elisabeth’s lips part. She breathes deep with great difficulty, though tried not to show it. “ _Dad_.” She merely signed.

“Yeah.” Franziska answers, her response dry and too immediate. “Typical, isn’t it?” She goes to turn then, and waits for Elisabeth to respond, “Wait,” but then her spite suddenly vanishes in realisation, and her eyes soften with an inexpressible guilt, “You—you didn’t _know_?”

Elisabeth just looks at her. She blinks a couple of times, swallows down the lump of anxiety along with a sliver of what felt like betrayal that had built within her throat. She could hardly think. Her mind was blank, and it was a heavenly white until she thought of Noah, and a film reel of their time together shot through her head like a cartridge of automatic bullets. 

Her attachment with Noah suddenly didn’t seem to matter as much as it did to her before.

The list of events that had happened within the last three years lay around inside her head like an unfinished puzzle, one that Elisabeth pieced together entirely and instantly when Franziska had confided in her.

She felt awfully homesick then, even though they were only a ten minute walk away from the actual house. But this wasn’t a physical, trivial homesickness. This was a _spiritual_ homesickness. It was the grief that came with losing time. It was the mourning of memories and mementos she wished she could relive, and pretend that what Franziska was saying was an insignificant fragment from one of her many nightmares.

She feels her sister’s fingers linger at the side of her arm, and she automatically steps away from the concerned affection. She didn’t want to be touched, right now. Not by anyone. Not even by Noah.

“Oh, Elisabeth,” Franziska starts, unsure of what to do. “I’m—I’m so sorry. I thought…I thought you knew.”

Elisabeth stares at the ground and attempts to process it all. Ever since she met Noah, it now felt like he had stolen her away from the world. The time she spent with him had been the best. But it had also been the worst, because at the same time, while she had let herself be sucked into his realm, she let the other half of her world suffer in return. 

Somewhere along that line, Peter had started to see someone else. Charlotte must have grown distant shortly after. Franziska became more quick-tempered. Elisabeth had been blind to it all—up until now, when her sister had thrown a brutal wrench into her relationship with Noah by interjecting herself between them, and by telling Elisabeth that their father had broken their family unit two years ago, and that everyone has been stepping on eggshells ever since, even if they are not aware of it.

It was only now that when she came away from Noah, Elisabeth was met with reality. The _true_ reality. _Her_ reality.

_ Not his. _

“I thought you were running to Noah for comfort,” Franziska says, her face stricken with the hurt of misunderstanding. “To forget about the issues at home. I had been running to Magnus. I thought we were both on the same page and that you didn’t want to discuss it, but when I saw you earlier outside from my window—it made me think that—“ Tears threatened to fall from her eyes, and she bites her lip hard, gritting her teeth afterward. “—that you wanted to leave. To leave everyone. To leave us. To leave _me_.”

Elisabeth blinks. She felt like crying, too. “ _Why would I want to leave?_ ”

“I don’t know!” Franziska bursts. “I thought Noah was like a coping mechanism to you. Fuck, I just—“ she shakes her head. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I should have told you about Dad. I should have known you wouldn’t realise it as soon as I did. I thought you knew all this time, and that going to Noah was like a getaway. I’m sorry.”

There’s a short silence that both divides and unifies them.

Finally, after a moment, when Elisabeth felt her heart return to its normal pace and her lungs refused to seize up, she replied. “ _I’m sorry too. For making you worry._ ”

She watches Franziska swallow back the tears that teetered on the waterlines of her eyes. She seemed more upset about this than Elisabeth was. Perhaps it was the pressure of responsibility for being the older sibling.

Franziska sucks in a breath to calm herself, and then pulls Elisabeth forward into a suffocating, but loving embrace. Elisabeth closed her eyes as her face settled into the crook of her sister’s neck. She felt the cool morning air hug at her exposed legs as they hugged. She took in the smell of Franziska’s hair, and her skin. She felt warm and strong against her. She felt _safe_.

A minute after when it felt appropriate, they pulled away from one another, and their eyes met. Elisabeth felt at one with her, finally.

“Alright, enough of all that. I’ll start crying for real,” Franziska smiles and sniffles at the same time. Elisabeth smiles back. “We better get back before Mom and Dad wake up.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth wonders how things will begin to change within her family. She meets Noah the following weekend, when he’s working in the tavern’s pub.

“You’re not sleeping with him, are you?” Franziska had asked, her approach oddly apprehensive, shortly after she informed Elisabeth about what was happening at home.

Elisabeth had cringed, and her eyes widened at the question. “ _What? No!_ ” She signed back, her gestures solid. Her response had been the God’s honest truth. For once, she wasn’t dancing around the actuality of the scenario, and she felt good about it, until she added, with a subtle hesitancy her sister didn’t notice, “ _It’s not like that with Noah_.” 

And that had been a bit of a lie. Even if it hadn’t happened yet, the likelihood of it occurring had a ninety-nine percent chance. She knew Noah had thought about it multiple times, because his ears always burned red when she touched on a similar subject. It must be torturous for him. She only had to think of how many times Franziska lounged around with Magnus to know how often “ _it_ ” should be happening. 

For a faint yet enraptured moment, she tried to imagine Noah on top of her, skin shimmery with sweat, and weight heavy and warm against her body. She knew without a doubt that he would be gentle and tame for her— _only_ for her. 

A smooth bullet of arousal pierces her belly. What if it were to happen _before_ she’s older? Or, to put it more simply—when would it be _appropriate_ to happen? At what point does a relationship _become_ appropriate? Who exactly decides that? Everyone developed differently; some fourteen year old girls had the bodies of eighteen year olds, some didn’t. Some had the mind and body of adult maturity, some didn’t. Not everyone is the same. Everyone is individual. Every girl is different. That meant every _relationship_ is different. 

_Do the rules of society really apply to everyone?_

Elisabeth swallows the dryness in her throat. She rubs her arms as her footsteps fall in sync with her sister’s. 

She was unsure of what to think and believe. All she knew was that she wanted Noah. And a fragment of her confidence felt ready for that. She’s reminded of how he had first touched her—fingers hungrily raking up her abdomen—and wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t used the bedsheets to divide them. She wonders what it would have felt like, for both her body and mind. She wonders how Noah would truly feel against her—when he’s overwhelmed with things only a man should be intoxicated with. 

A jolt of guilt pangs her chest. She thinks of Charlotte and Peter, and the unknown to come. What if this was going to be the death of her home’s familial love, and the birth of something unwelcome and estranging? A part of Elisabeth didn’t believe Franziska, but when she thought about it a little more, she had no other choice but to reluctantly agree. She couldn’t lie to herself. The evidence was right there in front of her. 

She recalled the many times she got home from school, when her mother was at work and her sister at her gymnastics class; Peter had been emotionally absent all throughout then, as though he was preoccupied with something more important than his own daughter. The invisible, parental chemistry Elisabeth once had with him began to crumble when she just turned twelve. 

Elisabeth felt suddenly foolish for fantasising over Noah. He had suddenly turned into this surreal, make-believe getaway, an escape from reality for her. Maybe Franziska was right. Maybe she had been unconsciously running to him all this time without even realising it. Maybe he really was just one of those attachments—

_No_ , came the little mumbling voice inside her, _that’s not true. You love him._

_And he loves you._

Elisabeth felt overwhelmed with it all. She was violently torn between the numbing ecstasy of flirtatious sport, the thrill of being so young— _being Noah’s Achilles’ heel_ —and the slapping impact of being told your mother and father are no longer right for one another, that God had made a stupid, irreversible mistake, and that this was how things were going to be.

Elisabeth had seen her parents endure the thick and thin of life’s hardships, though she was too young to understand what those hardships were. For Peter and Charlotte, the length of a divorce would exceed the number of years they have been married for. The process would be incredibly messy. Would a single affair really have the potential to split them after everything they’ve been through? 

_What if betrayal was the worst kind of pain—and the most inevitable?_

Elisabeth blinks, and tries to stop thinking. She was going to give herself a migraine. 

They snuck through the backdoor around six in the morning, Franziska chiding at her to take off her boots on the step so they could slip into the house noiselessly as possible. Their parents were still asleep. Elisabeth was glad Franziska was the one that found her with Noah. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if it had been her mother, or worse, her father. 

Regardless of Peter’s kind and meditativenature, he was capable of breaking someone’s neck with the right motivation. Elisabeth had only ever seen him descend into that character once or twice, both times being situations where Franziska had snuck out at some ridiculous hour of the night to see Magnus. Peter was always sat wide awake (and fuming) in the lounge for her returning home at four in the morning. 

Elisabeth tiptoed down the corridor, glancing back at Franziska, whose door closed with a slow, muted click. When she slid into her bedroom, she hung her coat on the back of her desk chair, went over to the window, and pulled the curtains open. She looked down at her carefully plastered feet under the young morning light that flooded her room, the sky less of a deep blue and now more of a flowery lilac. 

Elisabeth climbed into her bed. She lay on her side, and buried her face under her quilt with her knees pressed against her chest. Very faintly, she could smell Noah within her bedsheets. She then remembered she was wearing one of his t-shirts. She shut her eyes and was inherently brought back to the humiliating moment of Franziska dragging her out the door like livestock. Her sister had pummelled him with insults. She even called him out on potentially lying about his age—and she was absolutely right about that—and somehow he was still able to give a smile of assurance. It both puzzled and intrigued Elisabeth. She seemed to learn something new about him, every time they hit a dead end within their secret maze. 

* * *

The next time Elisabeth sees Noah is the following weekend, after she had made sure Franziska was convinced that he was just a friend. Franziska had eventually accepted what she was told, though it was obvious, to some degree, she still thought against Elisabeth’s words. She wasn’t stupid, but at the same acknowledged the supposed “truth” of their friendship with ease.

When Elisabeth entered the small, rustic lobby of the tavern, she had initially headed for the wooden staircase to go to Noah’s room, until the receptionist stopped her and said he was working his lunch shift in the pub. A wave of embarrassment flooded Elisabeth, and she thanked the woman with a nod. Was it that clear she and Noah were practically glued to one another?

She hadn’t expected the pub to be so quiet when she meandered in through the ornate timbered door. She had never seen it in person, as the times in which Noah was free from work didn’t allow her to see that faction of his life. A classic, time-honoured bar countertop stretched from one end to the other within the pub. The interior consisted of a deep, decorative mahogany and smooth, worn red leather.

Elisabeth’s searching gaze settled on Noah. He was stood at the far right with a circular drinks tray in one hand, and was exchanging a few light words with two women that were sat in one of the leather booths.

Elisabeth hardly recognised him in his work attire. The simplistic charcoal shirt and black slacks offered a painfulcontrast to how he dressed on a daily basis. His hair had been effortlessly brushed, and it looked remarkably dark under the mellow light of the pub. The only feature of his attire that seemed to connect all of his outfits, were the black leather military boots; the ones he wore everywhere he went.

Elisabeth watched him turn away from the women he was serving with a smile, and said something that made them giggle. As he made his way back over to the bar his eyes met Elisabeth’s, and a silent yet visible shock overwhelmed him. She watched him swallow.

“What are you doing here?” He asks, when they’re less than a metre apart. Her eyes were automatically drawn to the shirt he wore. She thought his naked collarbone was cute.

“ _I came to see you_ ,” she answers, glances at the two women, then back to him. “ _You look nice_.”

“Thanks,” he says, and quirks one corner of his lips. “I finish in twenty minutes. Are you okay to wait?”

Elisabeth took a seat at the empty bar, close to the door so she wouldn’t be overly noticed. She watched him pander around the pub to the three active tables, and she quickly established there was only one other person working in the kitchen. She figured Noah permanently waited the tables, and took the orders.

“Want a coke?” He asks, ten minutes later, when he’s getting another table their drinks. Elisabeth nods. She watches how he pops the cap off a glass cola bottle with frightening ease, using the flat edge of a pocket knife. He puts a straw into it afterward, and sets it in front of her, before preparing the ordered drinks. 

Elisabeth observes how his hands worked as she sucked the end of her straw. She watches the various-shaped glasses clink against one another on the tray as he put them down. At some point, he had rolled the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows, which showed off the natural muscle lines that were visible within his forearms. Elisabeth could make out the delicate veins that crawled across the backs of his hands.

She shuffles on the leather stool to watch him from afar. The drinks were for the two women he was talking to earlier, and agentle note of unexplained jealousy scratches the inside of her gut. She notices one of the women laugh. Noah was humouring them. His body language was different. He suddenly seemed his age, and not the soft, introverted post-teenager Elisabeth knew and loved.

When Noah comes back to the bar, she immediately signs to him, unable to control her inquisition. “ _Who are they?_ ”

Noah blinks. “Who, them?” His eyes flick to where the women were sat. Elisabeth nods, and it’s almost unnerving how quick he‘s able to establish what was going on in her head. “ _Don’t be jealous_ ,” he signs. “They’re just customers. I have to be friendly, you know. Wouldn’t want to lose my job.”

Elisabeth doesn’t let it go. “ _You seem to be more than friendly with them_.”

Noah stops what he was doing, and his eyes lock with hers. He comes close, and leans across the surface of the bar against his bare elbows. A few strands of his dirty blonde hair fall across his left eye. “ _If I flirt, they give me extra tips_.” He signs.

“ _You never flirt with me_.” Elisabeth answers, and Noah raises his brows in response. He cocks his head then, and pokes his tongue against the inside of his cheek in thought. 

“I do.” He says, and pushes himself away from the countertop. He turns and picks up a polishing cloth. “You just don’t notice. I do it differently with you,” he glances down to pick up a shot glass, and he smiles without looking at her. “Because you’re special.”

The jealousy vanishes within her when he says that. “ _If I was a rich older woman I’d give you all my money_.”

Thoughtful, and quite matter-of-fact, Noah frowns to himself. “If I was a rich older man I’d probably be in jail.”

Elisabeth is sipping her coke when she reads his lips, and it makes it her laugh. She recognised the irony immediately, and it was darkly accurate; it was the kind of humour that balanced both the reality and fantasy of their bond. She suddenly feels the carbonated drink shoot up the back of her throat, and it burns her nose, and Noah looks up when he hears her snort. He purses his lips to prevent himself from snickering, but seeing him restrain himself makes her even more hysterical.

“Sorry.” He says, when she calms down. Elisabeth glances over her shoulder to check if they weren’t disturbing anyone. “So, what does your sister think of me now?”

She thinks of her mother and father when Noah mentions Franziska, and the newfound issue she had been trying to bury under the sand. She had came to Noah to forget about it. Not to talk about it.

Elisabeth’s response comes automatically, “ _She’s convinced I’m sleeping with you._ ”

The chubby shot glass he’s polishing slips from his fingers in that second, and it hits the floor with a smash. “Fuck,” Noah utters, and disappears under the bar for a brief moment to pick up the shards. They both gain a few fleeting glances from the three tables.

Elisabeth leans forward over the bar to see him knelt on the floor. He glances up at her, lips apart. When he goes to stand, he knocks his head off the bar’s ledge, and Elisabeth winces for him. She watches him clench his jaw. He bins the glass shards.

“I mean, she thinks I’m seventeen,” Noah eventually says, rubbing the back of his head. “That isn’t so bad. It could always be worse. If she knew my real age I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you right now.”

Elisabeth swallows, her coke bottle now empty. He was right. “ _No. You probably wouldn’t_.”

Noah glances down at the watch on his wrist. “My shift is over. I’m going to go change.” He says, and takes it off and puts it in his trouser pocket. “What do you want to do?”

Elisabeth felt her stomach flip at the thought of Noah being torn from her. She was aware of the bare reality, and the consequences, if they were to be both stripped naked by the authority of her family and friends. They were constantly walking on thin ice. The thought was both terrifying and thrilling for Elisabeth, knowing that this was something not all girls found themselves wrapt in at the tender and turbulent age of fourteen.

Noah was an emotional _rarity_ —and she was adamant in keeping him a secret until time decided against her.

“There’s a lake near the forest.” Elisabeth replies. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth takes Noah to the lake. There, she confides in him.

Elisabeth waited for Noah outside the tavern, with her back leant against one of the flagstone walls. The rock had been warmed by the afternoon sun, and the gentle heat felt nice against her bare shoulder blades. She was glad she decided to dress light, opting for the white ribbed tank top she borrowed from Franziska, the same cut-off denim shorts she liked for hot days, and a pair of flat-soled canvas shoes.

Noah appears a minute later, and approaches Elisabeth with something in his hands. It was black and yellow.

“Check this out,” he says, and Elisabeth sees that he’s holding a rectangular, pocket-sized camera. She had never seen anything quite like it. She knew it wasn’t one of the digital ones. “It’s good weather to take some photos, don’t you think?”

She looks at the camera in his hands, then glances at his face. She rolls her eyes at him. “ _You’ll probably drop it in the water_.” 

Noah brushes past her with a growing smile, purposely bumping into her shoulder. She liked the feeling of his arm against hers. Having his skin against hers was something she knew she would never get bored of. 

“It’s _waterproof_.” He grins, and continues with a teasing note. “And you’ll thank me later.” He slips the camera into one of his baggy jean pockets. “Which way to the lake?”

* * *

“We should have brought some towels and drinks.” Noah begins, and yawns, legs stretched out in front of him. He goes to scratch his middle, and Elisabeth notices the most delicate of muscle lines run vertically down his abdomen. “We could have gone swimming.”

Elisabeth looks out across the lake. The sun made its glassy surface glitter white and blue. The last time she had gone swimming was with Franziska. “ _I need to get a new swimsuit first_ ,” she replies. “ _My old one is too small_.”

Noah clicks his tongue. “You don’t need one.”

Elisabeth thought about what he said at the tavern, when she had quietly complained about him not flirting with her. She figured this was his way of showing that kind of affection; being playful and the teasing, although, as much as she relished it, she found it borderline annoying. 

Half the time the hints weren’t even remotely romantic—if this was Noah’s way of enticement, his tactics were arguably juvenile, straightforward, and dry to the point where his bluntness was sometimes an immediate turn off. Sometimes the things he said would become so funny that the initial attraction she felt toward him would abandon her. But the beauty of it would always return, like a loyal hound with the fox hanging from its jaws, or a cat with the field mouse clasped against its abrasive tongue. 

The attraction Elisabeth felt was loyal. She subconsciously hoped the attraction Noah felt for her was loyal, too. 

They look at one another for a long time, as if they were trying to read each other’s minds. Elisabeth was unsure if he was being funny, or genuinely serious. His face was unreadable. The energy that emitted from him was enigmatic. 

“ _You’re a hippie_.” She eventually says, breaking the silence. 

“I’m just _saying_ —it’s not that important.” Noah wipes the back of his hand across his forehead, ridding the sweat that had built at his temples. His skin looked dewy and warm under the sun. ”Besides, it’s not like anyone else will be here when it happens,” he pauses, and Elisabeth notices something alluring spark within the depths of his eyes, “it’ll be just me.”

“ _What if my sister and her friends happen to drop by?_ ” She counters. 

“Easy,” he says, his words carefree and unbound from the potential of being caught. Noah was free from everything. 

“We’ll make sure they’re doing something else that day.” He gets up from the sand and pulls out the camera from his pocket. He fiddles with something before raising the viewfinder to his face. 

“Smile for me, wild girl.” He grins. Elisabeth sees the shutter blink. 

* * *

Noah is the first to kick off his shoes and roll up the ends of his jeans.

Elisabeth followed his lead. From her periphery, she watches him run a causal hand through his hair; he squints and shuts one eye when he faces the sun, and his creamy skin seem to glow beneath the clear sky.

Elisabeth swallowed, and felt an ethereal aura exude from him. Noah looked like a precious stone in this environment. She wanted to lock him tight within a little box, and keep him in her pocket forever.

She observes how he strays from the sandbank to where the land evened out with the lake’s rippling shore. Cattails and other water weeds sprouted from a large, shallow pond, and Noah steps into the water with ease. He looks back at Elisabeth and gestures her to follow him.

A wave of nostalgia floods her body when her fingers settle into the palm of his outstretched hand, and a heavy weight of deja vu rests at her shoulders.

The last time she did something similar to this was when she and Franziska were children. They both owned a bamboo landing net when they were young, and they brought them to the same lake, along with a large glass mason jar for catching tadpoles. Peter would have accompanied them with a picnic blanket and a packed lunch. Charlotte would have been at work. The pastime was something both Elisabeth and her sister only associated with their father.

Once, Franziska had trudged deep into one of the many ponds that surrounded the lake, and emerged minutes later hysterically crying—with infant leeches clinging for dear life to her ankles. Peter was trying not to laugh when he carefully peeled them off her, and Elisabeth had been mesmerised by the process.

An ocean of melancholia engulfs her insides, and it lovingly drowns her heart.

“Here.” Noah says, and Elisabeth hadn’t realised he’d let go of her hand, until she sees him holding something. Water trickles from the cracks between his fingers, and she peers into his hands; he held a skinny, wide-eyed, delicate black newt. It’s slippery skin glistened like glass under the sun, and Noah turned slightly so that his shadow shielded the amphibian. Elisabeth wets her hands, and Noah gently puts it into her cupped palms. She runs her middle finger down it’s back. It felt nice to touch.

“We sometimes find them in the wine cellar.” He says. “At the tavern.”

She nods. She feels him watch her. Mild, inexplicable tension sat between them. She watches the newt. The newt watches the two of them.

A moment later she bends down to let the animal swim back into the water around their ankles. As she goes to stand, she gasps in fright when out of nowhere, Noah presses his wet fingers to the side of her neck. She slaps his hand away almost instantly, and steps back, her heels digging into the soft earth of the pond. The feeling made her shiver.

“ _What are you doing?_ ” Elisabeth signs, her gestures harsh, and looks around her ankles for the newt. It had gone. She looks back at Noah, half-annoyed. “ _I could have squished it._ ”

His expression is unreadable, and she stares at him with observant, calculative eyes. He takes a few steps forward, and for some naive reason she thinks she’s going to be kissed—but he bends down tosplash water at her bare legs.

Elisabeth shouts his name in an attempt of trying to sound angry, but the laughter that sat at the back of her throat said otherwise, and it makes him smile.

She goes to trek her way out of the pond until his arms sneak round her waist, and in one swift movement he hoists her over his back as though her weight didn’t exist. Elisabeth shouts his name again, squeezes him in fear of being dropped into the water, and starts to giggle when he carries them both out of the pond and onto the sandbank.

The instant she sees him head for the shore of the actual lake, she tells him to stop, and when he doesn’t comply, she throws him off his balance, and they land into the sand with a hard thud.

The air is momentarily knocked from her lungs, but the joyous adrenaline within her numbs the discomfort, and before Noah can roll over she straddles him and grasps his wrists. She’s too rapt within the moment to even realise how all the fight flees from his body, when her bare, soaked thighs clench at his sides, and he quite literally allows her to pin his wrists above his head.

They both breathe. They take in their physicality, the intimacy of the position, the undertone of temporary innocence, and the heat that blazed down against them. Elisabeth can feel the fragile outline of Noah’s ribs under her thighs, and she felt like she had finally adopted the role of predator.

Her body shudders in recognition. It felt scarily good. It was beautifully empowering.

When she feels him completely surrender beneath her, Elisabeth slowly takes her hands away from his wrists to sign. “ _Now I can do whatever I want with you._ ”

Languid, Noah props himself up on his elbows, imitating prey attempting to reason with its enemy.

“I’d like that.” He says with hooded eyes, his breath hitting her lips.

Elisabeth imagines being underneath him; their bodies would imitate the function of a lock and key.

And then, her family appears in the forefront of her head. 

And the clashing images crush her. 

When the reality of the scenario settles within Elisabeth’s chest, like blood falling through the weightlessness of water, she clambers off him. How was she meant to weigh what she wanted? How does one even withhold a healthy balance of trying to come to terms with your family’s split and the desire of wanting to run away with someone eight years your senior? 

_There is no balance_ , her primitive conscience thinks, _there never has been_. 

_ Why try and create something that isn’t allowed to exist?  _

Out of her periphery she sees a flash of confusion wash over Noah’s face. She sits adjacent from him, and crosses her legs, withdrawn. 

“What’s the matter?” He asks, eyes full of a concern she was oddly unfamiliar with, yet it was the same concern she had seen when she appeared at his door barefoot, like an offering from the gods. Noah rollsover to sit upright, and he shakes the sand from his hair. 

Elisabeth swallows. She fails to look at him. “ _When can we have sex?_ ”

Noah blinks, dumbfounded and taken aback. “What?”

She turns to him this time, so they were facing one another. “ _How old do I have to be?_ ”

He stares at her, lips apart. “I—I don’t know.”

“ _When?_ ”

“Elisabeth—”

“ _Fifteen?_ ”

“Eighteen.” He suddenly answers, and she sees the emphasis roll from his lips. He meant it. He was serious. 

“ _No_.”

“No?”

“ _Sixteen_.”

“Seventeen.”

“ _Sixteen—_ ”

Noah peers into her face then, eyes dangerously narrowing down to pinpricks, and Elisabeth shrinks back. For a flailing, ridiculous instant, she thinks he’s about to morph into a vicious canine and devour her whole right then and there, half-soaked in pond water, salted with sand, and glazed by the beating sun. 

Very faintly, she remembers what Franziska had told her when she was just twelve, after Noah had kissed her—when they created that unspoken commitment. 

_ You have to wait until you find someone you really like. _

“Do you want it to fucking _hurt_?” Noah asks, his words visibly sharp. 

_You have to make sure the person you like is good to you, and that they love you as much as you love them._

Elisabeth was silent. She hadn’t expected him to say that. Not at all. An uncomfortable, throbbing anxiety pooled into her stomach. She felt as though this was something they weren’t meant to be talking about. Maybe it was because he was her polar opposite in terms of physicality, and that he was also older—she may as well have been asking him what menstrual cramps felt like. 

She had known him as calm and collected throughout their few years. He was the pacifist in the most aggressive of situations, and was the mediator in some ways too, and always somehow came up with a conclusion to any issue that eased her mind indefinitely. She knew, deep down, that his mild outburst was just the tip of the iceberg that lead to another world of complexities entirely. 

Noah leans back when she doesn’t respond, and when nothing else happens. She watches his face soften, and his predatory nature seems to fall asleep behind his open eyes. His pupils return to their passive, unassuming state, and he unclenches his jaw. He appeases himself on command. 

_ You’re too young to be in love with someone right now.  _

“Age and physical development is not always equal.” Noah says. Subtly, Elisabeth glances down at herself. Much to her stubborn disagreement he was right.

_Asshole_ , she thinks, then signs. “ _I thought it always hurts the first time._ ”

He blinks, and gnaws on the inside of his cheek in brief, mental debate. He stops and shakes his head. “ _No_ ,” he signs. “It’s not meant to hurt.” A beat. “But if it does, it will be because of me. And you.”

“ _But you don’t know that_.”

“Neither do you.”

Elisabeth felt the conversation come to a stalemate. Noah was incredibly good at finishing a debate when he wanted to, and he did it in a way that was seamless and orderly—as though he had already prefigured every word and phrase he was going to use, but he was merely talented at improvisation. Elisabeth reckons that was a skill he had developed during the many travels he’s never disclosed to her.

Despite everything, Noah made her feel like a child. She was beginning to wonder whether that was a good thing, being looked after and guided all the time. However, by the same token, she felt compelled to thrust herself into the deep end of their bond, and watch him swim after her as she sinks.

They sit quietly, beside one another. Elisabeth brings her knees to her chest. The sand between her toes is annoying. Noah points out how the little cuts along her feet had healed, but she doesn’t say anything. She can feel him observe her. That stupid, dumb concerned gaze was slapped back on his face. She hated it sometimes. She wanted him to look at her like she was a woman in her prime, with hungry eyes and a desperate need for her to be underneath him. 

His fingers dance across the back of her neck—thankfully they were now dry—and she shoots him a look.

“What’s wrong?” He asks her.

“ _My sister told me our dad is seeing someone_.”

Noah’s eyes falter from hers. He looks down at the sand between them, and he digs his fingers into it before replying. “Is that why you’re being weird?”

“ _I don’t know_ ,” Elisabeth says. “ _I’m not sure. I haven’t been at home much to see what’s happening_ ,” she stops, and feels her throat tighten at the thought. It was bizarre as to how Charlotte hadn’t latched onto her frequent disappearance. “ _I don’t really want to know what’s going on._ ”

“Hey,” Noah murmurs, and she feels his fingers touch her bare shoulder. She turns her head to look at him, and he’s staring at her with kind eyes. “No matter what the problem is, always tell yourself it could be worse.”

She listens to him. She observes his lips.

“Because things can always get worse. Even when you think they can’t, believe me.” Noah continues. “The love your father has for you and Franziska will never change. The love he has for your mother won’t change, either,” Elisabeth turns her head away from him then, partly in disagreement and in fear of bursting into tears before him; she didn’t want to be comforted like this. It was pathetic. But somewhere, underneath all of the triviality, it was necessary.

Noah’s hand flies up to her cheek, and he gently coaxes her sad gaze back to him.

“The intimacy just won’t be there anymore, and that isn’t bad. Everything happens for a reason.” he says, and a faint, smile of understanding forms across lips. His eyes search her face. “Love is so much more than just sex, you know.”

Elisabeth swallows, sniffles a little, and nods. Noah’s fingers fall to her jaw then. He leans forward, every movement gentle and docile, and he grazes his lips against her heated cheek. Elisabeth’s breath shudders. Instinctively, her eyes flutter shut when his other hand cups the side of her face, his thumb circling her cheekbone once, before his lips met hers with a tender, benevolent pressure.

She felt her insides bubble and melt. She attempts to kiss him back, and her gestures scream a sweet, naive immaturity that Noah embraces. She feels him smile into the now-graceless kiss, and she suddenly wants to start crying—everything was happening at a speed she felt blind to. 

Elisabeth pulls herself away from him to breathe. She feels a tear glide down her cheek, and out of embarrassment she lowers her head but Noah— _fucking Noah_ —has the eye of a hawk, and he swoops in to kiss it away, and she lets out a tremulous laugh at his affection. A whirling current of relief floods throughout her body then. A part of her felt healed.

“You’re pretty when you cry.” Noah says, as Elisabeth wipes her eyes. “I want to see everything,” he adds. His fingers dance across the back of her hand; he flicks his empathetic gaze to meet hers. “Even the pain.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone was wondering, Noah’s thrift camera is a 35mm Minolta Weathermatic :P


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth turns fifteen, and receives a letter.

She’s still asleep when Franziska thwacks a pillow down against her back, and Elisabeth rolls over, startled by both being hit and the blurry sight of her curtains being drawn open in a single swing. She very blindly makes out the words that emitted from her sister’s lips: _happy birthday._

“ _Thanks_.” Elisabeth says, smiling, her gestures weary and her eyes feeling blue as a newborn kitten’s. The bed forcibly dips when Franziska sits down, her long, beautifully unkempt, auburn hair bouncing with each springing movement she made. As Elisabeth sits up, her sister places a cardboard box in her lap. It had a fat orange ribbon tied around it. Elisabeth looks at her.

“Go on,” Franziska says, grinning. “Open it.”

Elisabeth unties the ribbon by pulling on one of its neatly cut ends, and lifts the lid off the box to reveal two items packaged in wrapping paper. Cute little fox cartoons were printed across the paper, and she glances up at her sister with a smile before opening up the smallest gift. 

A soft frown forms on her face when she observes the items. They were two blue and white boxes. She read the text that was printed across the fronts: _Polaroid 600 film._

“Guess what the big one is.” Franziska says, and Elisabeth gapes at her.

“ _You didn’t_.”

“It’s fully refurbished, too.”

She tears open the wrapping paper, and pulls off the sticky tape that clung to the bubble wrap, and seconds later she’s holding a black, box-type Polaroid camera. She carefully lifts up the flash bar, and it snaps backwards with a satisfying click to reveal a glossy, plastic lens and viewfinder, with the iconic rainbow feature trailing down its left like a river. She could smell how crisp and clean the hard plastic body was. It included every little detail of the true vintage piece she had anticipated in her head for the past year.

“Do you like it?” Franziska asks, still beaming, her gaze inquisitive and on-edge, and she leans in until their noses are inches apart. Elisabeth snaps the camera shut, and she feels the strength of it reverberate under her fingertips. She settles it snug in her lap before casting her arms around Franziska, and hugs her tight.

“ _I love it_ ,” Elisabeth says, the tiredness fleeing her body. She felt mildly dazed with it all. “ _I really do_.”

“The film doesn’t come cheap by the way,” Franziska notes with a small laugh. “Make sure you’re careful with it.”

Elisabeth nods and glances down at the camera, still smiling. “ _How did you know to get this?_ ”

The self-satisfaction in her sister’s face seemed to fade when Elisabeth asked that. She watches how Franziska’s gaze slowly flicks down to the camera in her lap. Despite her content exterior, there was something unbidden that gently swam beneath her glacial-like eyes.

“Noah.” She says.

Elisabeth’s smile softens when she watches the name roll off her sister’s lips. She glances down at the camera momentarily, in thought. This was because of him. She had only taken an interest in analog photography when he showed her how his thirty-five millimetre camera worked; the little black and yellow one. She had disliked how fiddly the machine was, and the process you had to go through in order to get your photos printed on paper. She didn’t have the patience for that, and it sounded expensive.

Quietly, she remembers, and pieces the memories together to create a perfect puzzle. Noah asked her once if she had ever used a Polaroid. A month prior to her fifteenth birthday, Franziska must have observed Elisabeth’s current interests with great detail—that type of camera being one of them.

She’s brought back to the present when out of her periphery she sees her sister’s lips move. “This was posted through the door an hour ago.” Franziska takes out a white envelope, and hands it to Elisabeth. “I—found it before Mom did.”

Her name was written on the front, in soft, casual but cursive lettering. The ink used was black. Franziska purses her lips, somewhat but clearly unamused. She was trying to conceal whatever was irritating her. Elisabeth knew that look.

A familiar, strange, but not uncomfortable tension settles between them in those few seconds, as she ran her index finger over her name on the envelope. Her lips part in instant recognition.

Franziska must have instantly noticed the change in her demeanour, because she pecks Elisabeth on the cheek before getting up off the bed with a slight bounce. Underneath her beaming smile something was eating away at her, the foreign entity tearing her apart long and agonisingly slow.

_ Why was this so unbearable for her? _

“Breakfast will be ready in ten.” Franziska says. “See you downstairs. Okay?”

Elisabeth nods, and watches her sister leave through the open doorway of her bedroom. Warm, pale-yellow morning light engulfed the room from her window, which casted the shadow of the frame onto the floor. The fleeting shade of a bird flits past. The walls of her space were tinted with the same soft, mellow, comforting colour. 

Slowly and carefully, and in emotional silence, she opens the envelope. She takes out what she assumed was going to be a card, but instead was a single glossy photograph.   


Elisabeth stares at it momentarily, taking in the fine authentic grain of the image, her mind a blank canvas; but then the memory comes back to her like a train wreck of both embarrassment and deeply fond amusement. A flame ignites within the pit of her stomach at the thought. 

The photo was of her, sat in the sand, with bare, willowy legs stretched out in front, the lake in her view. She wore one of Franziska’s tops, and a pair of denim shorts. She was looking past the camera’s lens—at the person who had taken the photograph—her gaze a cross between puzzlement and the premature birth of an innocent smile, as though she were about to reply to something that had been said with a laugh. 

Elisabeth checks the back of the photo. She feels a familiar warmth bloom deep within her when she notices more cursive text, the feeling similar to that of a materialised childhood memory. The words read:

_ Happy birthday, wild girl.  _

_ Love, Noah. _

* * *

The Saturday before her fifteenth birthday, Peter had visited to leave a gift, and took the girls out for lunch.  Even though she saw her father every few days each week, Elisabeth still hadn’t fully adjusted to his absence.

It had been a few months since he moved out and she suspected her parents hadn’t talked much about a divorce. But maybe a divorce wasn’t on their bucket-list at all, and that they were fine with being permanently separated. For now, at least. She didn’t believe for one minute they would be able to live out the rest of the lives still legally bound to one another. 

Within those few months of reflection, Elisabeth wondered what Franziska truly thought of their parents’ affair, because she had known from the beginning. It was arguable to say that she had known even before their mother did. The varying lengths of Charlotte’s shifts at the police station didn’t allow her to be in much intimate contact with Peter, which left Franziska in her place, observing her mother’s marriage through a daughter’s lens.

Elisabeth found that the most unnerving thing about Franziska was that she had both the eye of a hawk and the intuition of a clairvoyant. Those two qualities combined were powerful alone—but her fiery personality traits honed the acuteness of them even more.

Elisabeth remembered the turning point of Peter’s departure. There had been a single argument that gave him the leeway to leave the house for good, where Charlotte had nearly smashed a dinner plate over the top of his head.

Franziska was staying at Magnus’ house the time it happened, and Elisabeth remembered sitting at the top of the darkened staircase, watching her mother’s pacing shadow hit the nearest wall she could see, and the shade of her father’s lithe stature making dismissive gestures.  


When Peter left that night, and all silent movement seemed to cease, Elisabeth quietly emerged into the kitchen. She found her mother stood over the sink like a conflicted protagonist, and when she heard her daughter’s shuffling footsteps she turned around with a gaze of softened, withdrawn worry.

Charlotte had held Elisabeth’s face with great gentleness, her eyes penetratingly sharp and full of things her daughter had yet to experience. “Be careful when you meet someone you like.”

Elisabeth instinctively thought of Noah when she was told that. She wondered what kind of man he would grow up to be, and if she would be there to experience it happen. His eyes would never change, nor would his gentle exterior—but the repressed, half-dormant, predatory nature within him had the potential to alter all of that.

She was now old enough (with a little more experience of analysing the male psyche) to establish what that energy was within him: pure testosterone colliding with his own personal set of morals.

For an instant, she thought herself stupid for thinking Noah was caging a metaphorical canine within him, but then as quick as she had thought it she immediately decided against herself that it was true. Noah’s on-the-cusp-of-adulthood vitality still held that same world of complexities Elisabeth had almost entered when she naively confronted him at the lake. She had never seen past his exterior before. She hoped, as she grew, and as he became more comfortable, he would allow her a glimpse of what lay beneath his skin. His _true_ skin.

Elisabeth is sat at the table with a spoon loosely held in one hand and a bowel of cereal in front of her, watching the placid rain hit the kitchen windows when she feels her mother kiss her cheek. She blinks tiredly, and smiles a little in return. 

“Happy birthday, sweetheart,” says Charlotte, and moves a warm dry hand across to brush the honey-toned hair away from her daughter’s cheeks. “You’ll have to open my present later. Did you like Franziska’s?”

“Course she did,” Franziska cuts in as she sits down at the kitchen table, a speckled pear in her right hand, and a sharp knife in the other. Her coppery hair had been tied into a bun. She sends Charlotte a playful, complacent smile, “I had it planned almost a whole month ago.”

“I had mine planned since last year.” Charlotte answers, imitating the same complacency, and Franziska’s self-satisfaction vanishes. Elisabeth watches how she quietly stabs her pear, and tries not laugh. She liked it when her sister became competitive. Their mother sits down between them with a mug of coffee.

“You should both try and get out for some fresh air today,” She tells them, and glances out the window, observant. “I wouldn’t let the weather stop you from meeting with your friends.”

Elisabeth feels Franziska tap her shoulder, and she looks across to her. She smelled densely sweet. ” _Magnus and Mikkel should be free to come out_ ,” she signs. “ _And Jonas, too_.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the day of her birthday, Elisabeth reflects on her relationships with her sister’s friends. They play a game—and she stumbles upon a familiar love.

Elisabeth had felt a spark of fondness kindle within her belly when her sister mentioned Jonas. She had a soft spot for him. She loved everyone within Franziska’s friendship group, but held a fragment more affection for Jonas than she did for anyone else.

Her conscience thought it was because he was the most determined within the group to become fluent in sign language—but her gut said otherwise. She liked Jonas because she knew he was _good_ , both inside and out. There was no potential threat lurking beneath his exterior.

Her relationships with each of her sister’s friends varied. Magnus looked at Elisabeth as though she were Franziska’s other half, and, similar to Peter, he would pummel her persecutor to death if anything were to happen to her.

Bartosz never talked much with her. Elisabeth didn’t talk much with him. Although, the few times in which he had approached her, she immediately distinguished his acute ability to be both outspoken and surprisingly shy. She knew he and her sister shared a profound love for all things that involved metaphysics—especially time, and space. Magnus would become visibly jealous every time Bartosz struck an intellectual conversation with Franziska.

Martha was like another big sister, though slightly softer than Franziska, and more creative. When Elisabeth was twelve, Martha had always let her skim through whatever play she had been studying. Elisabeth enjoyed looking at the colourful annotation that was squished in at all angles of the text. Martha’s handwriting was pretty and feminine.

At the front of her _Ariadne_ text, Elisabeth remembered seeing a sticky note with several reminders jotted down it. Jonas’ name was written amongst the words, his inanimate presence like a blackbird against snow, and Elisabeth immediately noticed how Martha had written his name with such care. It was then she realised how much they loved each other—and that they were so _open_ with it.

Elisabeth often wondered how they found it so easy to be visibly in love. The concept felt so different, almost alien to her. Maybe she just liked the idea of keeping herself private, but when she idyllically compared her relationship with Noah to the likes of Martha and Jonas, the bizarre reality of it all came tumbling toward her like the break of dawn cracking its golden light across a field of green.

Elisabeth recognised that she and Noah were dancing around under the radar of what society perceived to be appropriate—and legal, for that matter—and acting as though they had committed murder together. There was an inexplicable, addictive thrill that came with it all. It was the thrill that came with _Noah_. Elisabeth once thought of him as a materialised form of her deepest (and arguably childish) desires.

“Happy birthday, blondie.”

She feels Magnus nudge his fist against one of her shoulders, when they’re stood outside Jonas’ house, and she looks up at him to find an endearing smile plastered across his face. “I bet that church-boy of yours is chomping at the bit to get you into bed.”

She grins at that, her cheeks hot under the mild humidity that masked the light rain, and tries not to chuckle in front of her sister. Magnus was never afraid to speak his mind, and she liked that. His own smile grows wider at seeing her laugh, until Franziska jabs him in the ribs, and he swears.

“Can’t you take a fucking joke?” He hisses at her. “She’s already legal, and this Noah-dude is what—our age?”

“The only person that’s allowed to encourage her is me.” Franziska says, and Elisabeth only catches half of her sister’s response, though she was clever enough to know the reply was a protective objection of sorts, because it always was.

“ _Happy birthday_.” Mikkel signs, and goes to hug Elisabeth. It felt somewhat foreign to be holding someone that was so similar in size to her. She had been so used to the physical contrast with Noah that she had forgotten what it was like to be amongst normality in all formats. Noah belonged to a different world entirely.

“ _Thanks_.” Elisabeth signs back, when they pull away from each other.

Jonas appears ten minutes later, visibly prepared for the weather. Although, he looked like he had just rolled out of bed, considering how tousled his hair was and that his shoelaces were half-tied. Magnus points out how he was twenty-one-going-on-twelve because he was wearing his yellow raincoat, and Jonas flips him the finger, dismissive, but does so with a restrained smile. Elisabeth thought he looked cute in his yellow raincoat.

“I think I’m just about fluent at signing the alphabet.” He says, when he approaches her. “ _H-A-P-P-Y-B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y_.”

Magnus calls him a dork, and Elisabeth objects, secretly and childishly flattered.

The rain had reduced itself even more when they reached the forest, and Elisabeth pulled down the hood of her rain jacket. The delicate sensation of drizzle against her face was soothing. It reminded her of both good and bad dreams. While they were walking, Magnus reached up and grabbed a branch that was clustered with leaves. He pulled it down, fast, so that the settled water within the foliage torrented down on Franziska, and she let out a loud shout and forcibly shoved him away from her.

“How does it feel being fifteen?” Mikkel asks her, when they’re several feet ahead of the rest of the group.

“ _I still feel like I’m fourteen_.” Elisabeth answers, smiling. He watches her hands carefully and it takes him a moment to register what she had said. He nods then, and smiles back.

“Yeah. I feel like that too.” He says. Elisabeth glances down at the ground as they walked. The toes of her boots had small wet leaves stuck to them. Mikkel taps her arm, then, and she looks back to him. They stop walking.

“Wanna see something cool?” He asks, and she nods.

She watches him take out a copper penny. He shows her it first, in his outstretched palm, and then he pulls up the ends of his hoodie sleeves to his forearms to prepare himself for whatever he was about to do. Elisabeth watches him place the coin into his other hand, and his fingers close around it. When he opens his palm seconds later, the coin had vanished. 

Elisabeth’s eyes widen. 

She grasps his wrist and pulls him forward in one strong tug, close enough until she could smell him. He laughs a little when her eyes search across the back of his hand and up his sleeve, his fingers no bigger than her own. She sub-consciously noticed how they were physically equal in all aspects. 

She lets go of him to sign. “ _How?_ ”

He smiles. “Can’t tell.”

“ _Please?_ ”

Mikkel shows her his other hand, and as he opens his palm the coin was sat, the same as it ever was.

“It never actually moves anywhere.” He explains. “It was here in my hand the whole time.”

“ _But—you put it into your other hand_.” She replies, and he shakes his head.

“Misdirection,” He adds, and points to his hoodie sleeves. “Is part of the illusion—”

“Flexing your _magic skills_ isn’t gonna get you a girlfriend, you know.” Magnus appears behind them both in that instant, and Elisabeth turns to see that his hands were wet from touching the foliage from earlier.

Magnus clasps a palm to the side of Mikkel’s face, and the boy squirms momentarily, his cheeks turning pink, and slaps his brother’s hand away from him. He wipes his face with his sleeve.

“I wasn’t flexing.” He mutters, and Magnus claps a hand on his shoulder, playfully pulling him under his wing, before looking at Elisabeth. For a brief, ghostly instant she saw a flicker of their father—Ulrich—in Magnus’ demeanour, and Mikkel no longer looked like the quiet preteen she once knew. The softness that once slept in his face had began to hollow, and Elisabeth could make out the faintest outline of his refined cheekbones. The men within the Nielsen family seemed to embody the same skull. 

“I think we should play a game. For nostalgia’s sake.” Magnus announces, when Jonas and Franziska appear.

Mikkel wriggles out from under his brother’s grasp. “But it’s _wet_ —”

“And we’re all fucking bored and broke,” Magnus cuts him off. “So, anyone got any suggestions?”

“Manhunt.” Jonas says, and his eyes land on Elisabeth. “She can hide first.”

* * *

She felt grounded within a mixture of childhood recollection when she goes to locate a place to hide. She counted the seconds in her head as she jogged away from the group, her heels thudding against the forest floor, her boots leaving hard, detailed prints in the mud she tried her best to avoid.

She quickly finds a vast expanse of shrubbery, off to the side of the small nature trail she had been following. The trees were different here. They were hardwood, and their large leaves created a variety of heavy canopies, which blocked the broad, drizzle-infused daylight and instead casted a warm, green shadow to the forest floor. The bushes were slightly raised by the uneven ground, meaning she could watch through the foliage to check if anyone was approaching her hiding spot.

Elisabeth clambers up the small hill, and crouches through an opening in the brush, and finds herself standing in a miniature glade. Pink and purple wild flowers sprouted from some parts in the grassy ground. She glances back at the opening she had came through before stooping down to touch the wet flower petals. She picks one from the root, idly twirls it in her fingers, and looks up to observe the tall trees—

—and her eyes settle on Noah.

He was stood several metres away from her, across the glade.

She drops the flower and jumps back a little, startled. “ _What are you doing here?_ ” She signs with brisk gestures. “ _You scared me!_ ”

Noah glances her up and down, eyes speculative and somewhat amused—and also partly captivated by her, as though he had just stumbled across a supernatural entity.

“Taking a late morning walk, I suppose.” He answers as he approaches her with slow, heavy steps, his hands buried deep within his jacket. His hair was damp from the drizzle, and fresh scuffs of mud plastered the knees of his faded jeans. He sends her a wily smile. “You look like you’re running away from something.”

She catches on to his playfulness, and very quickly, almost spellbound with his presence, she indulges in it. “ _Maybe it’s you._ ”

“I’m hurt.” He says, and she laughs.

Noah comes closer, and reaches out to touch the tip of her nose. He was wearing black fingerless gloves. He sucks on his bottom lip, and signs. “ _Looks like I’ve caught up._ ”

Elisabeth smiles. Noah casts her a soft, velvety glance. 

“You should come by tonight. If you can.” He says, and she notices the gentleness that emitted from his lips. She felt her spine tingle. Her heart thudded.

“ _I will_.” She replies, and he comes even closer, until his face is inches apart from hers.   


She feels him breathe. She felt something magnetic spark to life between them, and she stands on her toes and goes to kiss him—but just as she does, Noah presses the face of his index finger to her parted lips.

“Save it.” He whispers. Elisabeth blinks.

He pulls away then, his finger falling from her lips, and he takes a few steps back. “You can wait until then, can’t you?”

She rolls her eyes at his teasing, silently and internally abashed with how desperate she had looked seconds before, but he seems to ignore all of that.

Elisabeth watches how his eyes suddenly flick across from her, his demeanour mimicking the qualities of a deer hearing a branch snap. She follows his gaze and turns around, and peers through the foliage. She sees a flash of auburn hair pass through the leaves, and Franziska emerges from the opening with a smile on her face.

“Found you.” She says, breathless, and glances around at their surroundings. “Magnus was convinced you had gone to the caves. I followed your footprints.”

Elisabeth whips her head round to where Noah had been standing, in fear and embarrassment of her sister finding them together for what felt like the millionth time (especially when she turned up at his door at six in the morning and threatened to have him arrested) when in reality it would only be the second—but to her bewilderment, Noah had vanished. He was gone. Elisabeth blinks a couple of times, baffled.

_He must have known it was her_ , she thinks.

Franziska taps her shoulder. “ _Is everything okay?_ ” She signs.

Elisabeth hesitates, then nods. The picturesque image of Noah stood amongst girlish wild flowers within the small, flourishing glade refused to leave her mind. He had looked like a contemporary sacrificial offering from a Greek tragedy.

_We really are dancing under the radar_ , she thinks, her mind half-absent.

Franziska searches her sister’s face, eyes sharp and calculative before letting her gaze fall to the forest floor, and she quickly spots the wild flowers with admiration.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the evening of her birthday, Elisabeth stays with her mother and sister. After dark, she leaves the house, and spends the small hours of the following morning with Noah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This particular section of the story was inspired by “Candles” by Daughter, I thought the song resonated well with the coming-of-age theme, but each to their own! :D I’ve also uploaded a playlist post on my tumblr (also called Cerfblanc) for this fic, if anyone is interested :P
> 
> (This chapter was initially way too long lmao, so I’ve had to split it in half).

As the day slowly rolled to evening, Elisabeth’s stomach began to somersault. She had been mentally prefiguring the moment when she would slip out of the house after dark, wearing nothing but the sweatshirt Noah had given her and the same cotton shorts she had worn when she appeared at his door like an unintentional gift. This time she wouldn’t forget a pair of shoes. 

“Here.” Charlotte says, a motherly smile lingering at her lips as she pushes a small, neatly wrapped box across the kitchen table to her daughter. Elisabeth could visually distinguish the quietness within her voice. She looks up to her mother, who was sat directly opposite her. Franziska was elsewhere within the kitchen, angrily fumbling with a stiff box of white birthday candles. 

Elisabeth carefully unwraps the present, only making tears at the corners where the cello-tape sat. Beneath the wrapping paper sat a small, leather-bound box.

As she opens it, and her eyes fall onto a pair of gleaming, creamy, Lilliputian-sized pearl studs.  


She sets down the box, and her fingers fly up to tug at her earlobes, and she looks at her mother with bubbling excitement. Charlotte just laughs. 

“You never asked, but…I thought you might want to get them pierced at some point.” She says. Elisabeth nods. She runs the tip of her finger against the sea-stones, and takes in their beautiful fragility. There was something melancholic and wistful about pearls she couldn’t fully comprehend, but the shimmering, opaline allure of them seemed to mask that. 

The attraction of them makes her think of Noah.  


She closes the box. It snaps shut, like the Polaroid, beneath her fingers. As Elisabeth meets her mother’s tender gaze, something spectral gingerly overcomes her. For a brief passing moment, the absence of her father strikes a chord within her chest, and she knows her mother notices the change of mood almost immediately.

“ _I love you_.” Elisabeth signs, her gestures meek. 

A small, yet elated smile tugs at the corners of Charlotte’s lips. She blinks, and signs back. “ _I love you too_.”

Franziska darts over the table then, venting how she had finally gotten the box she was fumbling with to open, her sudden presence a bullet to a glass window, and the frantic energy of it all makes Elisabeth giggle. She gets up to follow her mother and help set the table for dessert, but Franziksa pushes her back down into her seat. Elisabeth catches sight of the waxy white birthday candles bunched in her sister’s palm. 

“You’re not allowed to see the cake.” Franziska signs, grinning. “Stay here.”

Elisabeth stays, and her sister disappears behind her. A minute aftetward, Charlotte turns off the main light, and comes and sits adjacent to her, and out of her periphery she sees Franziska carrying the birthday cake. Familiar, mellow, golden light emitted from its surface, the white candles her sister had been holding seconds before alight and bright as burning little strips of magnesium.

Elisabeth watches her mother and sister sing in sync, the words that left their lips soft and quiet, and she relays them in the back of her head.

“Mom baked it.” Franziska says, with a smile. “I did the icing.”

Elisabeth couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her sister so elated. She glances at the cake, and immediately recognises that it was the face of a fox. Franziska had placed the fifteen birthday candles in an intricate circle, as though it was a fiery white crown for the animal.

“I  _ started _ the icing,” Charlotte corrects, chuckling a little. “But then Franziska said I was doing a shit job at it, so she finished the whole thing off instead.”

Elisabeth lets out a laugh. The hilarity and trueness of it warms her chest. She could visualise the scene almost perfectly; her mother stood with a piping bag of orange frosting at the kitchen counter, lips pursed together in concentration, and Franziska hovering at her side giving a sarcastic, discouraging commentary. 

Her mother and sister urge her to blow out the candles. 

“Wish for something good.” Charlotte whispers. Elisabeth glances at them both. The candle light flickered. It cast a luminous glow across their faces, and the depths of their eyes darkened and glittered with a beautiful intensity. Elisabeth feels herself shudder in contentment. 

She glances down at the candles. The wax had began to dribble down the sticks. Elisabeth shuts her eyes. 

She thought of her mother and sister.

Then her father.

Then her friends. 

She thought of Mikkel, Magnus, Martha, and Bartosz. She thought of their families, too. 

She thought of Jonas. 

Elisabeth opens her eyes, and blows out the candles. 

And she thinks of Noah. 

* * *

She lies wide awake for an hour or more, when everyone had gone to bed. She stares across her darkened bedroom within that time, still and unmoving beneath the covers, as though she were pretending to play dead, and her eyes watch the beam of yellow light within the corridor vanish from the narrow gap beneath her door.

Quietly, and with great care, she swings her legs out of the bed, and the balls of her bare feet stick to the floor of the bedroom. She swallows and stands, pads softly to her drawers to take out Noah’s sweatshirt, and decides to keep on her pyjama shorts. As she pulls off the t-shirt she wore, she catches herself in the little upright mirror sat on her dresser, and her reflection startles her.

The curtains were still drawn back from earlier in the morning, which allowed the muted, silvery moonlight to launch the delicate shadow of the window frame against her naked bust. Her wispy blonde hair looked frosted and pearly beneath the ethereal light.

Once Elisabeth had pulled on the sweatshirt, she pulls on a pair of socks, and picks up her boots by their thick chubby laces before leaving her bedroom. She drifts down the staircase into the darkened kitchen until she reaches the backdoor, and puts on her boots when she steps outside into the cool night air.

After tying her laces she glances up at Franziska’s bedroom window before running off into the deadened lamppost-lit street, the paranoid part of her picturing her sister stood behind the glass with that hawkish gaze, but her curtains were closed. The windows were dark. Everything was still.   


The whole house was asleep, and Elisabeth was wide awake and alive, within a world that felt so frozen in time. 

* * *

It was midnight when she reached the tavern.

From the small, clouded, outside windows lodged between the century-old cobblestone foundation, Elisabeth could see the mellow light that glowed through the glass like fire. The pub seemed busy, but Noah wasn’t working tonight.

She gently pushes open the reception doors, and is thankful to find that the clerk was elsewhere and not patrolling her desk. Elisabeth slipped past the lobby and padded up the wooden staircase, and reaches Noah’s room with a pounding excited heart.

She scratches his door gently, like an animal looking for shelter, little nails clawing at the ornate wood, and a moment after the handle twists, and light floods into the dark corridor as the door opens.  


She feels a weighty sense of deja vu nestle around her collar when their eyes meet. They had been here before. And each for different reasons.

In the aftermath of the dream that drew her out into the street, Elisabeth came to Noah for comfort. He came to nurture her.

But things were different.

She now came for affection.

He now came because he wanted her.

Every movement made was totally and completely intentional—there was no room for regret in their world. Regret simply didn’t exist.

Elisabeth doesn’t expect Noah to reach out and take her by the arms, his sculpted hands clasping themselves around the small expanse of her lithe limbs. He pulls her close and kisses her gently, and she watches him blur in front of her, eyes guileless and curious as their noses bump. She forgets to move her lips against his, and to her slight annoyance, he pulls away before she can playfully reciprocate.

Noah grins. “I made you something.”

“ _I told you not to get me anything_.”

He ushers her inside, still smiling. “I said I _made_ it. I didn’t buy it.”

Elisabeth glances around the room before going to sit on his bed. It was tidy, for once. The only few things that lay about were his boots and jacket. A towel was hung across the back of the settee; she looks to where Noah was stood sifting through one of the drawers of the dresser, and when he turns she notices how the tips of his hair were damp and sharp with remnants of water.

He sits down opposite her, and crosses his legs, his bent knees almost touching hers, holding another white envelope. Elisabeth watches in silence as he takes out a paper circle that had two thick pieces of twine tied to either side of it. Her eyes catch a glimpse of a beautifully intricate drawing.

Noah holds it up in front of her. He shows her either side of it.

One face of the circle had the profile of a red fox. The other side had the profile of a grey hare.

He pinches the ends of the twine. He pulls them taut, then, and rubs them between his fingers—and the paper disc flickers back and forth in response. The two images combine and visually merge into one.

A small gasp escapes Elisabeth’s throat.

She stares at the quivering, spinning pictures; she had seen something like this before, but it wasn’t quite the same as Noah’s creation. It reminded her of early, innocent childhood.

“ _How?_ ” She signs. He smiles, and stops twirling the twine between the fingers. The previously animate images sat flat in his palm.

“It’s called a _thaumatrope_.” He explains, emphasising the last word with his lips, and she processes the syllables in her head. “You draw a picture on either side, and the two images merge when you twirl the string.”

“ _It’s like magic._ ” She says.

“ _Science_ is magic. It is also religion’s counterpart. They’re like brother and sister, in a way.” He replies, and sets the paper disc in her hands.

For someone who seemed to be so deep-rooted within certain areas of religion, Noah accepted the counter arguments of what he believed in. He seemed to accept everything as it was, even if those views defiled his own personal beliefs. 

Elisabeth observes the drawings on either sides of the disc, and she remembers him saying that he had _made_ the optical toy. He hadn’t bought it.

She sets the item in her lap to sign. “ _Did you draw the pictures?_ ”

He shrugs, and smiles a little, his body language sheepish. “I might have.”

Her eyes widen. “ _You never told me you could draw!_ ”

“There’s a lot I haven’t told you.” He answers, and his words implied something else entirely, even though they addressed what she had said.

She felt an undertone of melancholia tickle her insides, but it wasn’t enough to make her gut swoop to the bottom her belly.

Elisabeth glances at the thaumatrope once more. The drawings were both beautiful and incredibly distinct. The animals’ faces had a flash of what she identified to be watercolour, and were inked with the utmost care. The eyes of the animals were both a vivid yellow.

Elisabeth puts the thaumatrope back in the white envelope, and sets it aside. “ _It’s beautiful. Thank you._ ” 

She saw that Noah’s little gold crucifix pendant still hung from the lamp on his bedside table, suspended in time, the same as she had always remembered it.

Something shifts within the air when she goes to sit back opposite him. The feeling was familiar, yet at the same time was still painfully new. It was something she still hadn’t been able to completely fathom.

Noah’s eyes darken, but not maliciously—a vibrant, unwavering, intense desire settles deep within his light irises. Elisabeth knew with a primitive sense that this was the look of want; it was the look that transcended all forms of verbal communication, the look she had been so desperate to receive. Chemistry could be quite remarkable when it wanted to be. Even amidst several layers of contrasting undertones, Elisabeth found herself gravitating toward what her body perceived as a potential threat—yet, somehow, upon her return to reality, she came back strangely unscathed.

_Thanks to his self-control_ , she thinks, when Noah’s lips meet hers.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth feels a step closer to becoming a woman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Please proceed this chapter with caution, though nothing overly explicit is depicted, refer to the tags stated on the overview).

His movements are too soft for her liking.

Elisabeth presses forward, and Noah’s eyes flash open at her eagerness.

He pushes back, and one hand caresses her jaw as he continues to kiss her. The act suddenly felt like a game. The adult chemistry that had initially struck them thinned like blood loosening in water, and inevitably, she found herself wanting to giggle against his lips. She feels him smirk. He turns his head sharply, and her lips slam into his cheek.

“You’re so bad at kissing.” He says.

“ _I just need more practice_.”

“It’s like you’re eating my  _ face _ .”

“ _If I were a fox I would eat you_.” She counters whimsically. Noah crawls closer, his damp, dirty-blonde hair falling across his eyes.

“That depends on what animal _I’d_ be,” he says with a shrewd smile, and leans near. Elisabeth could feel him whisper. “What would you like me to be?”

Her stomach lurches in anxious excitement. This felt like a fantasy. But it was _real_.

“ _Wolf_.” She signs, her one-word gesture soft, and maybe a little too fluid, but he still understands.

“Am I that scary?” Noah asks, and she realises he hadn’t been expecting that response. What did he see himself as?

Elisabeth pauses, and she’s unable to stop her eyes from stealing a glimpse of his parted lips. Her gaze flits down his neck, and she watches him swallow. The little apple that sat in his throat rolled once, and disappeared into the smooth expanse of his skin. She envisioned herself reaching out and raking her nails down his throat, just to see if it would surface again. The opposite, contrary, older sex fascinated the infinite child within her. Noah had things she didn’t—and not all those things were physical and bodily. These were things suspended deep within the soul, and every soul was strangely distinct, just like how everyone had an individual finger print. She wanted to see every part of him.

“ _I don’t know_.” Elisabeth admits, several moments too late, but he doesn’t acknowledge that. Noah had the patience of a saint.

“Would you like to find out?”

His breath hits her neck.

She thinks he’s about to pepper her in butterfly kisses, like she had always secretly imagined from the beginning, every movement soft and tender, the way it was meant to be within a girl’s head, but it doesn’t happen that way.

Elisabeth almost screams—and finds herself laughing.

Panic fills her from head to toe when she feels his teeth dangerously graze the supple skin at her neck, and the deja vu that was previously sitting on her shoulders slammed through her bones and shakes her mind to the core, and all she can focus on is how _naive_ she felt in more ways than one. She had jumped into the deep end, and, just like she had wanted, testing his loyalty, Noah was attempting to hurl her back to the surface—but he was doing it with his childish antics, as if he was trying to reverse her inevitable transformation of becoming a woman. 

_And why?_

He wasn’t benefiting from pulling her back to shore. He wasn’t gaining anything. Altruism wasn’t in the predatory male psyche. Selflessness wasn’t allowed. It didn’t exist. When Peter left, Elisabeth indolently wondered if women and children were all ultimately subjected to becoming collateral damage at some point in their lives.

Her mother’s words echoed in her mind. _Be careful._

_Be careful_ , Elisabeth repeats, not really listening to herself, _this is how girls are meant to think._

_ But how are men supposed to behave? _

It came to her then, silently trickling like a persistent leak in the back of her head. For a split second Elisabeth pretended that the man on top of her wasn’t Noah, and she thinks— _he wouldn’t be tickling me. He would be taking advantage of me._

_ I wouldn’t be laughing. _

It puzzled her. Maybe good men did exist. And Noah happened to be one of them. She realises the severity of the situation, but doesn’t address it upfront. She tries to drown it with the elation she was feeling in the present. The severity didn’t matter right now. It never would. Because she could _trust_ Noah. Noah wasn’t like the common man, whatever the common man was.

_We’ve been here before_ , she thinks, suddenly feeling fourteen again, _and it didn’t end well._

Noah’s fingers dart to her sides, and little by little, she feels her sweatshirt ascend her skin. The cool air of the room licks around her midriff, and her doubtful thoughts shatter at all angles; she lets out a hysterical laugh at the unbearable feeling and almost elbows him in the jaw on instinct. She sees him laugh, lips flitting down her outstretched forearm, and a little jab of anguish pierces her lungs; the needling desire to hear his voice forces its way into her gut.

Noah’s fingers grasp at her clothing, and his head disappears under the front of her sweatshirt. Elisabeth shouts his name with the kind of laughter that burned the shaft of her stomach. She felt her cheeks burn at the ecstatic sensation, her hind legs kicking against his thighs like a rabbit being held down to slaughter, arms locked tight around his back, hands at the back of his head with little fingers friskilyclawing at his damp, freshly washed hair.

She squeals, giggles, and she’s never felt so young—until she throws her head back into his pillow, long blonde hair spread at all angles, and her eyes roll shut.  


The smell of him seems to surround her entire body, and it’s all her senses are in touch with, and her blushing, glowing face relaxes with uncertainty when she feels his dewy lips brush against her breast.

Elisabeth opens her eyes.

Her hold around his back loosened. Her fingers stopped tugging at his hair.

The air slips from her lungs, and the quietest of gasps escape her parted lips. 

His breath was hot and heavy against her skin.

She shuts her eyes again to comprehend the feeling, and the child within her can’t help but envisage the dark, chasmal, gaping jaws of a wolf hang over her naked body.

She feels Noah kiss her chest. He carefully laps at her skin, his licks kitten-like and agonisingly delicate.

The child locked within her felt scared to the core—but the _girl_ that controlled her every thought and move was absolutely enthralled with what was happening, bounding with delight toward what felt like the worst kind of danger, but for some reason it never seemed to land at her feet.

It vanished every time she thought she had caught it by the tail. She thought, with oblivious naivety, that the predator was afraid of the prey.

Elisabeth’s breath hitches and her voice cracks for a split second. _Shit_ , she thinks, in realisation. She had just stifled a gentle moan of approval.

Noah pulls his head out from under her sweater, wettish hair disheveled and cheeks a healthy pink. The sight of his blushed, attentive face lowered to her naked middle made her knees weak. His eyes were glassy with a thirst that seemed too adolescent for his character. It was boyish. The vigilant, preoccupied young man of twenty-three had been suddenly dowsed with teenage callowness.

A flutter of discovery throbs inside Elisabeth; Noah wasn’t even a true adult. Sure, he was of age, and he had the body and everything that went with being a youthful, vigorous male, but just like Elisabeth—he didn’t have the mind. And he wouldn’t have that for a long time. Longer than she would. She unconsciously cherished the little snippets of intimacy he milked for her, because he rarely allowed her to taste the adulthood she was far from being let into, but when he did, every worry and pressure that bred within her ceased to exist.

She felt no worry because it was _him_.  


_Noah_ was accompanying her. 

It was _him_ that was guiding Elisabeth through every little unspoken thought. 

There would be nothing inside her—not even the aching thought of her family and friends—except for the flourishing, limitless, ever-lasting urgency for Noah.

“Do you want me to stop?” He asks, panting lightly. A tender crease had made its way between his brows, creating the softest of concerned frowns on his face.

He had never asked her what she wanted. Not in this context, at least. She had the confidence to ask for something she wanted on a general note, but this kind of demand was utterly foreign to her.

Elisabeth swallows and shakes her head at him, heart pounding and gut riveting with disordered juvenile arousal. But, wedged within her voiceless answer, sat a single thought: _I don’t really know what I want. Maybe I want whatever you want._

Noah watches her for another few moments, as though he hadn’t even acknowledged her response, before making what Elisabeth decided was his own judgement. His eyes never leave hers when he slowly goes to kiss above her navel. Shyly, praying it wasn’t obvious how her every limb shook with thrilling apprehension, she brings her fingers to touch his hair again.

He leans into her palm, like a cat, eyes intense and penetrating.

Noah crawls up to kiss her lips, and he gives her time to reciprocate at her leisure. The endearment is slow at first, but then she feels the extent of his arousal wash across her body like an oppressive ocean wave. His kisses became hard and hungry.

Noah climbs on top of her. Elisabeth felt fuzzy, though her senses were through the roof. She was alert and beyond aware of what was happening. He pushes her thighs apart, and glides his palm up the inner side of her bare leg, and past her belly. She feels his fingers caress the ridges of her rib cage, and then he pulls her into him, until their bodies seemed to mimic the liquidised union of a yin and yang.

Noah tenses when she rolls her hips against his, in attempt to get more comfortable beneath him, and his mouth stills against hers. Elisabeth locks her legs around him, and repeats the motion, shuffling. She feels the change in his breathing, and rolls her hips into him once more, a little part of her stupidly curious to know if he _liked_ it—and her inquisition is quenched when he buries his face into the crook of her neck, nose and mouth in her hair, and she shivers when she feels him groan against her throat, the resonance of his voice sending tremors throughout her whole body.

She tries to squeeze a hand between their stomachs, and her fingers just catch the waistband of his underwear when Noah lets out a laugh of surprise, grasps her spindly wrist, and pins it above her head.

“Cheeky.” He says in a breath, and kisses her, and their teeth hit for a split second. It’s not long before she feels him shudder, wiry, steady arms enveloping her, and he momentarily freezes, hips bucking once into hers. Elisabeth wished the clothing she wore didn’t exist.

They don’t move for a while. Well, Noah doesn’t. Elisabeth shuffled slightly, confused at the abrupt lack of movement, but then she suddenly felt one foolish step closer to becoming a woman when she realised he was hot and hard against her inner thigh. Her mind raced. She hugs him tight, eyes staring at the ceiling, and her heart pounds when his fingers appear at her waist, nails slipping under the loose sides of her shorts until they’re lingering at the elastic of her underwear—silently dancing in an interval of decision.

Time seems to congeal in Elisabeth’s head. She felt emotionally fused with Noah. But now, they were stood at a crossroad, and the choice to decide was out of reach for Elisabeth—because this was _Noah’s_ choice.

Elisabeth’s stomach dips with a rapid, painful flicker of anticipation. She knew exactly what he was thinking. She was old enough to comprehend bodily language now. The sexual chemistry that bled from him was felt with a psychic strength.

Noah’s self-control was now like an unravelling thread, fraying and thinning until it hits the power of selection.

Elisabeth decided that would be the time when her world would officially shift—when she will become a woman. When he takes a piece of her for himself; her virginity would become a token of success for him, a trophy of achievement, the lifetime execution of innocence at the hands of someone you stay with until the end of time. There was the potential of that someone also becoming a wavering, fading face in an ocean of to-be strangers.

What did girls feel when that chastity fled their bodies? When did sex become such a _wonder_ of the human life? Why did humans have to be so stupidly complex?

_ And why do we think so fucking much? _

Elisabeth knew, with great, distressing anxiety, that Noah was fully capable of manipulating her into doing whatever he pleased. But Noah would never do that. She’s known him for four years now. Four years was a long time. Four years was a long time to coop up your real self from society. Noah has been both genuine and pure, inside and out.

_A canine without bite_ , she thinks, _maybe I’m just lucky._

Elisabeth’s attention is drawn back to Noah, like earth gravitating toward a black hole. He kisses her face. He fondles her hair, and his fingers touch her bottom lip, contemplative and searching.

“Beautiful.” He says with remembrance, as though this had happened before.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s half twelve in the morning when Elisabeth sifts through Noah’s belongings. He takes out a CD, and asks if she can dance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was listening to a lot of New Order while writing this, apologies. The music stated is both by the band, “Temptation” being from their “Total” album (sorry I’m such a dork when it comes to music, especially when writing for OTPs). T^T

“ _Why don’t you just do it?_ ”

It’s the first thing that comes to her mind, and it’s the first thing she signs to him, when Noah gingerly gets up from suffocating her with his weight, while wondering how hard he was fighting with himself to not completely obliterate her body and soul that was at the budding age of fifteen. 

It made her compare him with Magnus, and how he carried himself when he was around Franziska—there were no restraints when it came to being touchy with them two, and Franziska always happily obliged. They were also both equal in their physicality. A perfect match.

_And they’re also the same fucking age_ , Elisabeth thinks. She grits her teeth at the mental counter argument. 

It both angered and frustrated her. But it was a point she was unable to deny, because it was the truth. For obvious reasons she refused to address, there would always be a slight divide between her and Noah. For now, at least. She was still young. 

Noah turns away from her as he sits up, shoulders full of a tension he was trying to rid, but he still looks at her to reply. “I feel like I value your virginity more than you do.”

Elisabeth briefly ponders on his words. She thought she valued herself more than anyone, but maybe Noah’s self-restraint exhibited the extent of how much _he_ treasured her purity.  


The only catch was that his fixed abstinence made her want him even more. A part of her found it admirable, and that he needed to be rewarded. He _deserved_ to be rewarded. 

Elisabeth thought back to her pool-analogy. Maybe she was too heavy for him to hurl back to the surface. He was enduring both of their weights combined, every fighting wade through the water birthing new pressure onto his lungs.  


It would be so easy now, to let go, and just—stay submerged. Forever. 

_Maybe I’m drowning him_ , she thinks, but then rephrases her thought; _maybe we’re drowning each other._

“ _Doesn’t it hurt?_ ” She asks, and sits up against the headboard of the bed. She presses her knees together, and feels herself slowly return to reality. She quickly becomes conscious of what had happened. The ghost of his lips and the watery sensation of his body against hers still lingered at her skin. “ _When you—don’t do it?_ ”

Noah is about to open his mouth to reply in confusion, until his thoughts all come together on his face, and the establishment is sorely visible. He understood what she was implying, and it was obvious, because Elisabeth had _felt_ it.

He glances down at his thighs. He sucks on his bottom lip. Then, quickly after, but definitely too late, he shakes his head in response. 

“No. Not really.” He says. His cheeks flush accordingly. Elisabeth stares at him, unconvinced, and then she senses the dam-of-tolerance break within his body, and his inner anxiety floods the room. “Okay, it does—but only sometimes. Rarely. But, not really. I’m used to it.” 

_Used to it?_ She thinks, as he gets up before she can pry even more, briefly fixing the crotch of his sweatpants before disappearing into the bathroom, his palm flying up to rub the back of his neck.

* * *

Elisabeth happens to glance at the digital alarm clock that sat across the room on Noah’s bedside table, as her fingers brush something plasticky in the drawer she’s lazily poking through. 

_ 00:36 A.M.  _

She had been sifting through his few belongings while waiting for him to emerge from the bathroom, ten minutes after he had eagerly slipped off the bed.

She expected Noah to own very little in terms of belongings, but to her mild surprise he kept a considerable amount of personal items, some of which ranged from taped, dog-eared envelopes of documentation to things as random as lithium batteries (probably for his camera) and wooden clothing pegs. 

She found a couple of books with yellowed, timeworn pages, and recognised the novel _Brave New World_ , solely because she knew Martha had a hardback edition of it. 

Elisabeth also came across a copy of _Lolita_. The book’s spine was weathered white and papery; a sign of love and indulgence. Curious, she flicked aimlessly through the pages, stopped at a random page and scanned over the clotted, small-printed text. Her eyes landed on a few sentences that felt set apart from the rest. 

_ ‘We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.’ _

Elisabeth had yet to understand literature and complex prose. In spite of that, not many fifteen year old girls understood this kind of creative monologue. But the clusters of appealing words here and there caught her attention sometimes. She liked to form them in her head, and wrap her voice around the non-existent sounds that slept within the syllables. 

She had blinked and shut the book, and let her mind run elsewhere, back to Noah. 

Elisabeth knew he wasn’t the type of person to sink their roots into one place and call it home. She sometimes wondered if he even had a home, or at least came from one, before she found him adrift yet strangely organised—for someone who seemed to refuse to settle anywhere, Noah definitely lived every second of his passing life in the moment. In the here, and the now.

She had never asked him about it. And he had never alluded to it. Some things were best left unsaid. Elisabeth agreed with that statement—but it didn’t rule out her natural inquisition. 

She reaches into the back of the drawer and takes out the object her fingers were lingering over. It was a clear, flat, rectangular box, about the size of her hand. 

It had a picture of pale pink flowers bunched together on its front, and read: _NEW ORDER. Power, Corruption & Lies._ She glances at its back, and finds the date of manufacture. _1983._

She opens it up gently, and instantly recognises what it was—a cassette tape. Her father had owned a few when she was small and young, but most of his music collection now consisted of CDs. Elisabeth had enjoyed examining them all, taking her time in absorbing all of the different artwork that was portrayed on the outer cases. 

She quickly locates a clear portable tape player that had a pair of outdated stereo earphones connect to it. She sets the two objects on top of the dresser and peers into the drawer, hands clasping the knobbed wooded handles.

When Elisabeth first met Noah, she thought he was an overtly organised person, due to his minimal attire and subdued personality—but upon seeing how he had sorted his belongings she decided he really wasn’t. He wasn’t organised, but he wasn’t messy. He was somewhere in between.

Upon wandering past her, four years ago, dressed for what felt like the end of the world with that watchful, intense gaze strewn across his lovely face, Elisabeth decided that Noah’s chosen way of living diverted from one end to the other whenever it felt like doing so.

She finds a box of condoms pushed to the back of the drawer, amongst his underwear.  


She shakes it a little, out of curiosity, a jab of jealousy already prefiguring itself in her gut for the last woman (or man, if he was into that) he had slept with.

She felt that the box was full, and then noticed the plastic wrapping hadn’t even been taken off it. A cool, childish relief floods through her. She puts it back and shuts the drawer, and lifts her findings to the bed. She sits cross-legged and places one of the tapes into the player, pushes the play button and watches the tiny reels begin to turn.

Elisabeth only notices Noah emerge from the bathroom when his figure sits down opposite her, in the process of pulling a t-shirt over the top of his head. Her eyes catch a glimpse of his torso, and she notes how milky his skin is. He had yet to spread himself under the sun and receive a light tan.

“Quite the explorer, aren’t you?” Noah says with a small smile, his eyes flicking down to the cassette player between them. Elisabeth shrugs. 

“ _You were taking too long._ ” She answers, as he too crosses his legs. She reaches out her index finger to touch the skin of his exposed ankle, and faintly runs it down his bone. The sparse hair above his joint was coarse and thin. Noah doesn’t move. His skin felt oddly cold under her touch.

Elisabeth’s brows furrow inwards then, and she pulls her hand away. “ _Why are you cold?_ ” She asks.

“I had a cold shower.” He replies, and she instantly grimaces at his answer, and it makes him laugh. He glances off to the side to avoid her gaze, in search of the correct response. “Girls—don’t need cold showers.”

“ _Why not?_ ”

“Why do you think?” Noah says, and reaches out to run his index finger down the delicate slope of her nose.

Elisabeth blinks, and she stares long and hard at him, as though she were expecting the answer to appear across his face. His eyes falter to the cassette player when she fails to reply. He lifts up the tape she had found.

“I find just about everything in charity shops.” He says, and swipes his thumb across the plastic case in thought. “But maybe that’s just luck taking pity on me.”

Elisabeth picks up the cassette player, the little reels still silently turning within the tacky machine, and she crawls to one side of the bed.

She curls up into the space she knew he always slept on, bare, pink knees pressed together—in slight apprehension, of him potentially catching a glimpse up the relaxed fit of her pyjama shorts—with half of her face buried into the pillow that would always smell of his beautifully bedraggled dirty-blonde hair.

Perhaps she was just overtired and disoriented, but Elisabeth felt as though she had been welded to Noah’s ghost in that instant. She blinks heavily. His intense, watchful gaze didn’t seem to unsettle her now. She could fall asleep to the idea of him lingering at her shoulder in the form of a palm-sized angel.

“ _What does it sound like?_ ” She appeals to him, and picks up one of the stereo earphones, holding it out to him, as though she were a child gifting a macaroni necklace to its mother. Noah smiles, and crawls across to lie down next to her.

He puts the earphone into his ear, and picks up the empty cassette case and points at which song was playing. Elisabeth shuffles closer to him to see, until their shoulders were pressed together. _Age Of Consent_ , she reads in her head. It sounded lawful and evocative at the same time.

“It’s quite fast.” Noah explains. He describes the instruments to her, and attempts to illustrate what the song meant, even though the title of it was quite self-explanatory.

“ _Say the words for me_.” Elisabeth instructs, her gestures small and shy. Noah picks up the tape player and presses a button. He rewinds it to the beginning, and settles it between them.

She swallows when she feels the pressure of his fingers settle against the inner of side of her forearm. She could feel him breathe. The faintest of freckles littered the delicate skin just under his eyes.

Noah begins to tap his fingers against her skin. It tickles initially, but she doesn’t feel any playfulness exude from him this time. The energy she felt between them was unusually calm. She watches him. 

“ _Won’t you, please let me go?_ ” He says, the words rolling smoothly from his lips, ghostly blue eyes downcast at her arm, fingertips tame, warm and quick against her skin. “ _These words lie inside, they hurt me so_.”

Elisabeth gages the rhythm within her head from the beat of his fingers, the phantom of her voice echoing the lyrics in the back of her conscience.

“ _And I'm not the kind that likes to tell you, just what I, want to do, I'm not the kind that needs to tell you_ ,” Noah thrums his fingers. “ _Just what you, want me to_.”

She watches him murmur out the next few verses, and then he lifts his chin to meet her eyes. “ _You’re not the kind that needs to tell me—about the birds and the bees._ ”

His fingers change the repetitive rhythm then, and she glances down to see how he presses his two fingers together, and glides them against her skin. It makes her giggle.

She understands how his pressure changes in order to mimic the music. She assumed this was his attempt at portraying the melodic, wistful physicality of the eighties’ synthesisers.

He stops suddenly, and he blinks. Elisabeth observes him, eyes flickering across his face. He lifts his fingers from her forearm.

“Can you dance?” He asks her, and she catches an ephemeral flash of boyishness glimmer past his face.

Elisabeth’s lips part in thought, although the answer to his question came in less than a second to her head.  


Being a budding teenager came with the agonising beauty of having two left feet, and a bagful of clingy anxiety that clawed at her lungs every time she thought she was going to fail at something.

“ _Not really, no_.” She finally says, pursing her lips into a thin line.

Noah grins, and she’s given a glimpse of his pearly teeth as he pulls the earphone jack from the cassette player.

He presses a button, and the reels jam to a stop. “That’s good. I can’t either.”

He gets up from the bed then, and sets the items aside and kneels down to sift through his rucksack that was slumped at the door. She watches his elbows disappear into the depth of the bag, and his hair falls across his eyes as he peers into it, as though he were digging up clams from solid, waterlogged sand.

She doesn’t expect him to take out a rather dated, compact disc player, and a CD case that had a split down it’s plastic front. 

She eyes how he opens up the player and carefully places the CD inside it. She asks what song he had skipped to, when she sees his lithe fingers repetitively press a particular button, and he manages to stuff the portable player into the oversized pockets of his sweatpants.

He jams the earphones into the jack before slotting one of the buds into his ears. He lets the other dangle at his chest before approaching her, and shows her the back of the abstract CD case, and points to the chosen title: _Temptation_.

Now, that was suggestive. Elisabeth looks to him questioningly, with a slight roll of her eyes.

“It’s one of my favourites. It reminds me of you, of course.” Noah jokes, but the smile on his face says otherwise. He tugs Elisabeth up from the bed and guides her into the middle of the room, hands locking around her wrists as though she were his doll and his play-thing; the living and breathing animate luxury that had chosen to bless him.

She pries him off her to sign. “ _I told you. I can’t dance_.”

Noah shrugs, his movements light and unbound. “I can just—twirl you around the room,” He says, and playfully knits their fingers together, his tongue pressing against the inside of his cheek.

He brings one of her hands to his lips, and presses a quick kiss to the backs of her fingers. Elisabeth fights the urge to giggle. He tells her to watch his lips. She nods, and her juvenile anxiety vanishes.

She feels his fingers thrum against her lower back, the beat tangible and easy to follow in her head. She starts to smile when he begins to usher her into an improvised dance, and follows the rhythm she felt from his fingers, and attempts to imitate his movements.

They stand on each other’s toes several times. Noah presses her against him moments later, and as if on cue, her eyes flick to his lips.

“ _Heaven, a gateway, a hope_.” She can see how muted his voice is, the words glissading from his lips paper-thin and fleeting. “ _Just like a feeling, I need, it’s no joke._ ” He moves her gently, backwards with ease, and his clutch on her hand loosens, but she grasps him back. She wasn’t completely ready to relax.

“ _And though it hurts me, to treat you, this way. Betrayed by words, I’d never heard—too hard to say_.”

His fingers thread through her hair, eyes vivid with a callow youth she could reciprocate with, and she laughs aloud when he whirls her round, as though she were a petal and he was the wind.

“ _Oh, up-down-turn-around, please-don’t-let-me-hit-the-ground, tonight I think I’ll walk alone, I’ll find my soul as I go home._ ”

Her gut flips at the sudden strength she perceives within his arms, and he swings her fast, until she thinks she’s about to lose her footing—gold hair swirling around them both, socked little feet thudding against the floorboards, with bare, pale legs pliant and girlish, tender as a newborn lamb’s—and he hauls her back to her balance in an instant, a wily grin plastered across his lips.

Elisabeth curls her arms around his waist, until their chests were pressed together. The collar of his outstretched t-shirt allows her to bump her nose against his naked sternum. He was warm to touch, and to hold. She feels the rhythm slow to how it began, and his thudding fingers against her lower back softened.

“ _Each way I turn, I know I'll always try_ ,” Noah’s lips touch her temple, and his hand flits to cup her face, his thumb circling her cheekbone once, and only once. “ _To break this circle—that's been placed—around me_.”

His hand at her waist moves up slowly, and she grins into the crook of his neck, when his fingers slide under her clothing with frightening ease and confidence, and they drum against the outline of her naked rib cage.

She can feel the dangling earphone at his chest dig into her, but she doesn’t care. The rhythm he was maintaining against her reduces suddenly, and she can only feel him tap one finger to her skin.

She pulls back a little to meet his face, and hangs her arms around his neck. Noah presses their foreheads together, and Elisabeth quivers under his embrace as he murmurs out the next few sentences. 

“ _Oh, you've got green eyes—oh, you've got grey eyes—oh, you've got blue eyes_.”

There’s a pause, and Noah’s eyes flick to her lips.  


She watches him swallow, and she grazes her fingertips against his throat. She can feel his voice. 

And by God—it felt beautiful.

“ _Oh, you've got green eyes—oh, you've got blue eyes—oh, you’ve got grey eyes_ ,” he repeats, louder this time, bottom lip glistening in the mellow lamp light that filled the room. “ _And I've never, seen, anyone, quite-like-you-before. No I've never, met, anyone, quite-like-you-before—_ ”

_Enough_ , she thinks with a smile, and kisses him with such force that his eyes widen in hungry acknowledgement.

Noah pulls the earphone from his ear and allows the plastic buds to clatter against the floor, and she can feel the desperate energy within his arms crush around her body.

Elisabeth smiles against his lips, quietly ecstatic. Their teeth hit for a moment, and she feels butterflies batter her insides when his tongue skims across her bottom lip. She reluctantly turns her head to breathe seconds after, and Noah’s nose brushes against her cheek. His lips gently pepper her, in a playful attempt to coax her back to him.

“I like you.” He says bluntly, as though he were drunk, when she looks back at him. “A lot.”

Elisabeth breaks into a laugh, and he lets go of her so she could reply. The sudden absence of his warmth felt foreign. 

“ _Tell me something I don’t know._ ” She signs.

It was both consoling and thrilling, to be so innocently intimate with him.

She plans to sleep beside him tonight for the first time, and envisages how it would feel to be forever encased in his warmth and his scent—until the crack of pale dawn spills into his room through the window, to pull her back home.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The time is nearing to three in the morning. With much reluctance, Noah tells Elisabeth he has a sister.

The next time Elisabeth’s eyes settle on the digital alarm clock is when Noah takes a picture of her without her looking.

_ 02:49 A.M.  _

She heavily exhales through her nose, feeling somewhat lethargic and overtired. The last time she had felt so weary was when Franziska had asked their mother if Magnus could come and stay the night, a few weeks after Peter left. Charlotte had merely nodded, but enforced the rule of no alcohol whatsoever, before taking herself away to bed. 

With sentiment in mind, Elisabeth vividly remembers the curing, teenage serenity that filled the lounge that night. Franziska ordered a Chinese takeout to the house, and the three of them had sat and watched a mixture of psychological-horror films. 

Magnus was wedged between them on the sofa, with his legs spread in front of him. Franziska was perched at his side, and he frequently complained how she moved too much. Elisabeth sat with her knees pressed against her chest, and watched with shy amusement how Magnus silently picked through the bowl of sweet-and-salted popcorn Franziska made for them, eating only the sweet. 

Elisabeth had wanted to sleep, but was unable to. She had transcended to another level of tiredness that day. 

Halfway through the third film Franziska had chosen, her mind wandered to Noah. 

She wondered if he thought about her as much as she thought about him. 

She wondered what it would feel like to fall asleep against him, in the bed they often used as a playground, and under the sheets that held tangible traces of his body and soul combined. 

She eventually dozed off against Magnus’s shoulder, while breathing in gentle notes of her sister within the bobbly material of the hoodie he wore. When her eyelids became unbearably heavy, Noah appeared behind her eyes, when the comforting darkness drowned her conscience into sleep. The phantom of his fingers danced across the back of her neck, and they lovingly slid across her shoulders. 

Her body was suddenly certain she had felt it happen in the physical—but that had been Magnus slipping an arm under her upper back, and then the couch felt strangely light beneath her; he hooked his other arm under her legs, and had carried her upstairs. The half-conscious feeling reminded her of when Peter would carry her six-year-old-self up to bed. 

Elisabeth rubs her eyes, and glances at the alarm clock once more. 

_ 02:53 A.M.  _

_If Dad knew about Noah_ , she thinks, with immediate unease, and attempts to block out the image of her father’s quietly infuriated face. _If he knew just a little, not even the whole story—that would be more than enough to make him irate._

Noah’s fingers settle against her belly, then, and nothing seems to matter anymore. 

She’s torrented back to the present—which was in his bed, pressed beside him shoulder-to-shoulder, next to the bedside table with the glowing lamp and the crucifix dangling from its warming light.

“What are you thinking about?” He asks, his voice visibly hushed. Elisabeth shivers at his touch. 

“ _Lots of things_.” She signs. He pulls his fingers away. 

“Like what?”

“ _Does it matter?_ ”

Noah watches her. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

Elisabeth turns away from the lamp and onto her side to face him completely. The pillow she rested her head against had his scent weaved through every part of it. Noah also turns to face her, and props his head up with his elbow. 

“ _Do you believe in God?_ ” She asks him, after a moment of basking in the small-hour stillness of his room. 

Noah’s eyes flick past her shoulder, and they settle on the crucifix pendant. He looks back at her with a smile of faint affection. “Sometimes.”

Elisabeth thinks deeper. “ _Do you believe in paradise?_ ”

“Paradise?” He mimics, his brow furrowing for a split second, as though the word was a distant memory to him. He shuffles closer to her, until he was leant over her face, lips lingering above hers. 

“ _Yes_.” Elisabeth repeats. “ _Paradise_.” 

“No.” He answers simply, his breath hitting her cheek, and the fond smile that was previously there had dissolved. “Well, not with God, at least.”

“ _Then with who?_ ”

“You.”

She feels her cheeks bloom pink, and Noah grins. Seconds later she’s pushing his face away from hers in fear of embarrassing herself even more. Noah turns his head, her fingers spread across one side of his profile, refusing to leave in case he swooped in to peck her lips. 

She feels him laugh a little, and his teeth dangerously graze her svelte fingers. Then, as if he were a harmless, unassuming creature, his lips flit down to kiss the palm of her hand like a kingfisher attacking a stagnant pond. Elisabeth looks back at him with a youthful hesitancy he had seen too many times—one that reeled him in without fail. 

She smooths the face of her thumb against his supple skin, instinctively cups the side of his face, and runs her fingertips along the prominence of his cheekbone—copying the way he always did it to her. His eyes stare right through her body and soul. Regardless of the innocent affection, there was a spiky undertone to the scene; it was as though he was going to eat her alive.

“ _Tell me something I don’t know about you._ ” Elisabeth says. Her gestures were becoming weary. 

Noah rolls onto his back. She watches his throat, and ogles the bobbing apple that silently sat. His eyes roll to meet the ceiling above them. He swallows, his mind clearly elsewhere. An air of unwillingness descends into the room. 

Then, when she leasts expects it, he inescapably replies with a reluctance that passed over the top of her head. 

“I have a sister.” Noah says. 

He said the words like he was confessing a murder. 

Elisabeth sits up, and crosses her legs, hands clasping both ankles. A little burst of jubilance fizzles to life within her, and the tiredness that filled her body gave way to momentary alertness. 

“ _Really?_ ” She signs. 

He had never told her this. In the years they had known one another Noah had _never_ told her of this. 

This was _new_. 

This was all so new—like they were meeting for a second time, but in the same life.

He quirks one corner of his lip. “Yeah.”

“ _Why didn’t you tell me before?_ ”

“There was no need.”

Elisabeth sucks on her bottom lip. She lets the information circle inside her head until it sinks into the depths of her knowledge, and it’s only then does she continue. Noah had his arm cast across his forehead, as though they were laid beneath a sweltering summer sun. 

She mentally produces the half-formed figure of a woman with the same, gritty-coloured hair as Noah. 

“ _Is she pretty?_ “ Elisabeth asks. 

She _had_ to be pretty, whoever she was. His sister _had_ to be beautiful, without a doubt. She might be even lovelier than Noah, considering that he already embodied some well-chiselled, delicately alluring features; a woman could enhance those gorgeous qualities even more than a man could. 

“Yeah.” Noah answers, without meeting her persistent look. 

“ _Does she look like you?_ ” 

He pauses, in thought. He nods. “A little bit. Her hair is much darker.”

“ _What is her name?_ ”

“Agnes.”

_Agnes_ , Elisabeth repeats. _Agnes and Noah. Noah and Agnes._

“ _Where does she live?_ ”

“Vechta. With her girlfriend.”

“ _What is she like?_ ”

“She’s nice.”

It was only when Noah went to rub one of his eyes did Elisabeth notice the one-sidedness of the conversation. She could feel his despondency. Despite birthing the topic of conversation, for whatever reason he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

But the reason didn’t matter with Elisabeth. Very quickly she thought of her own circumstances, and how her home life had been shaped after Peter’s departure and the muffled healing of Charlotte’s happiness. She wouldn’t want to openly talk about her father and act as though he were the best person in the world—when in reality he wasn’t. He had left their family for someone else. Every human being appeared on earth with flaws.

Elisabeth quietly empathised with Noah. She hoped he could feel the warmth she sent with her longing eyes, even though he wasn’t looking at her. Maybe he had the same, mildly estranged relationship with his sister, like she did with her father.

In defiance of her thoughts she found herself sinking deeper into the topic Noah was attempting to leave.

Elisabeth treaded carefully, stupidly inquisitive. “ _What was the last thing you said to one another?_ ”

Noah’s hooded eyes roll to meet hers just as she asks that. They pierce right through her, as though she didn’t exist.

He watches her observantly, his tired gaze lingering across her body, taking in the expanse of her legs and her plush thighs. She notices him tear his eyes away from her then. He rubs his face, and pinches the bridge of his nose before turning to meet her.

He smiles a little, and that smile was enough to make Elisabeth think that everything was fine and estranged relationships didn’t exist in his life of drifting from city to city, person to person, bed to bed—until he opened his mouth to reply.

“She told me I was unhinged.” He says.

Elisabeth could see him struggle to remember what happened. A blow of guilt rushes to her chest at the sight. It was like he was reliving it right in front of her.

“I—called her a whore,” he adds, and to Elisabeth’s hushed shock a laugh slips from his lips. But it wasn’t a humorous laugh. It was a laugh full of extreme anxiety. “And then she threw a wineglass at my head.”

Elisabeth looks at him blankly. That sounded like a lie. It was too blatant. Too comical. He looks at her, his watchful face soft and observant. He somehow knew when she was doubting him.

“…I can show you the scar, if you want.” He signs, before she can muster a response that didn’t sound insensitive and downright ignorant. Elisabeth blinks. She clenches her jaw, hesitant.

Noah turns his head toward her, and brings his fingers to the side of his forehead, close to the tender skin of his temple, and brushes back the length of his mousy hair to reveal a little white scar, sawlike and serrated in shape, half-hidden by his hairline.

Elisabeth is unsure of what to say. She reaches out, motions visibly indecisive, and she gasps a little when he clutches her fingers and places them over his temple.

The healed skin of the scar was uneven, and much softer than it looked beneath her touch. Elisabeth slowly threaded her fingers through his hair. She could feel his warmth. She pulls her hand away.

“ _I’m sorry_.” She says.

Noah’s brow knits together in confusion. “Sorry for what?”

Elisabeth shrugs, and swallows. Her throat felt dry. Her stomach flipped at how tactless she had been. “ _For asking about your sister._ ”

Noah fractured, that anxious laugh appearing again, and he chuckles at the reality of it all. “That’s not even the tip of the iceberg,” his face softens in understanding, and he sends her a smile. But it’s a dismal smile. “We wouldn’t be normal if we didn’t have problems, right?”

Elisabeth nods faintly, in forlorn agreement. Then, gently, in attempt to console the situation, “ _Do you…still talk to her?_ ”

“I send her the odd letter sometimes,” Noah says, as he rolls onto his side, his face half-hidden in the pillow he was pressed against, sandy hair sprawled along it. “But she never sends one back. She probably doesn’t even live at the address anymore.”

“ _Can’t you just call her?_ ”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“ _Then get one. A phone is important_.”

“No. I don’t like technology.”

Elisabeth sighs. And I thought I was stubborn, she thinks.

Noah tries not to smile. A cheeky energy suddenly exuded from him, despite the topic of discussion. He liked to win. Very little seemed to affect him. He laughed instead of shedding a tear. He smiled when he was being snapped at. Elisabeth wondered what the raw and unrefined side of him thought of it all. There were two sides to everything, and so far, within the last four years of knowing him, she had only ever seen a single part of him.

“ _Do you miss her?_ ” Elisabeth questions.

He blinks a few times, and his eyes glaze over as he lets her question repeat itself in his head. He nods once. For a moment, she thought he looked like a homesick child, and not the mysterious twenty-three year old man that had lured her in with his magnetism alone.

“What about you?” Noah asks, and shuffles closer to her. Apart from the cryptic charisma, he had the chameleon-like ability to change his emotive colours when he desired to. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

The golden lamplight behind her warmed his blanched complexion, and brightened his pale eyes. Elisabeth takes a moment to think. What did Noah _not_ know about her?

“ _You know everything_.” She says, minutes later.

“I do?”

“ _I think so_.”

They lie against one another for a moment more, until Noah sits up. He fiddles with his camera again and turns to take another photo of her.

“You’ve never really told me about your friends.“ He says, scrunching his nose as he peers through the viewfinder. The camera shutter blinks once. “What are their names again? I’ve forgotten.”

Even though he wasn’t suggesting it, the idea of it flooded Elisabeth to her heart’s brim. The thought of Noah becoming a new addition to the group excited her more than he seemed to realise.

Amongst the many other things she wished could happen, this was one of them. She had been initially apprehensive of the concept, and came up with many potential disasters in her head—most of which included Franziska attempting to claw his eyes out, if they were to be caught flirting with one another.

Apart from that, she couldn’t find any other emotional wrench that would damage the easy dynamic of the group. Noah was shy and introverted. Everyone doted on the introvert of the group.

Elisabeth couldn’t resist indulging in the topic. “ _You would like Magnus_.” She begins, already smiling with delight at the thought. “ _He sometimes asks after you. He thinks we would be a good couple._ ”

Noah blinks, and his face pales. “You’ve—told him?”

Elisabeth shakes her head. “ _No. He just likes to joke a lot. You would like Martha, too. She’s super pretty. She and Magnus are siblings. Mikkel is also there, but I don’t really see him much now. And Bartosz! He’s nice. He kind of reminds a little of you—_ ”

“Bartosz?” Noah repeats, unaware he had cut her off.

Elisabeth blinks and picks up on the invisible tension. “ _Yeah. He’s part of the group, too. What’s wrong?_ ”

“Nothing.” Noah responds, and shakes his head dismissively. “He just—sounds familiar, somehow. Who else is there?”

Fondness strikes her chest when she thinks of Jonas. “ _You would love Jonas. He’s so nice. And cute. I can see you getting along really well with him. You would get along with everyone, come to think of it._ ” 

_I’d love to see that happen_ , Elisabeth thinks with aching wrists, unconscious of the fact that she was not just wanting to include Noah into her group of friends, but into her whole life—being included meant being accepted. They wouldn’t have to dance under the radar anymore. They would be free. _She_ would be free.

Noah’s eyes suddenly narrowed, but Elisabeth didn’t pick up on the high frequency of unexplained hostility that seeped from him. Although, it wasn’t directed at her. He had never directed true aggression toward her. She had never felt harm emit from Noah in her life.

“What does Jonas look like?” He inquires. 

Elisabeth visualises Jonas in the forefront of her head. “ _He’s your height. Strawberry-blonde hair. Blue eyes. He wears a yellow raincoat everywhere he goes._ ”

Sweet, amiable, lovable Jonas, the boy who had always been genuinely interested in everything Elisabeth did. Martha didn’t realise how lucky she was—and lucky was an understatement.

“ _He has a nice face_.” Elisabeth adds, with a note of nostalgic affection, and can’t help but smile at the thought.

“He sounds special to you.” Noah replies, the implication in his words shameless and factual.

Elisabeth turns her head to face him fully. That narrow look in his eyes had softened, but it was still there. The hostility had subsided. He was mulling over something, but she wasn’t sure of what. It came to her on cue, outright and obvious, and she felt stupid for not having thought of it minutes ago.

“ _…Are you jealous?_ ” Elisabeth asks, her gestures purposely slow, and she casts him an innocent gaze—the gaze she knew that made his abstinence fracture with desire—when underneath her unsophisticated facade she knew, for reasons unknown, Noah had formed some sort of grudge against harmless Jonas.

“What? No. I haven’t even properly met him yet,” Noah retorts, and glances elsewhere, swallowing in reflection. His eyes skim back to meet hers, and he sends her an inviting, shrewd look. “But I’m curious as to why you’ve spoken so warmly of him.”

Elisabeth freezes.

_ Shit. _

“ _It’s not like that_.” She signs briskly.

“So, I don’t have any competition?”

Elisabeth dithers at the impossible thought. “ _No. You don’t_.”

“Are you sure?”

“ _Stop talking about it!_ ” She half-snaps, and she slams a hand down onto the mattress, and she almost laughs when she sees him flinch at the harmlessness of it all, if it wasn’t for her desire to make him shut up and rid the slither of jealousy that resided within him.

His pale blue eyes are wide and glassy, and his hair was tousled and strewn across the pillow. Noah curls up and hugs his knees, laid on his side, every little movement cautious and careful beneath Elisabeth’s stare, his calculative gaze fixated on her. He looked like an opportunistic child that had been scolded by its mother.

“ _Jonas is a close friend_ ,” Elisabeth starts, as though she were giving him an instruction. “ _He’s with Martha, anyway. Stop thinking about it. It’s annoying_.”

“…I’m annoying?” Noah repeats. 

_Oh my God._ Elisabeth rubs her hands down her cheeks, and shuts her eyes. She felt like rolling over and kissing him, but at the same time so badly wanted to smother him with a pillow.

_He’s so fucking infuriating_ , she mentally groans. _But he’s so fucking beautiful, too_. 

“No. You’re not annoying. I love you.” She says, beyond doubt, and averts his glassy eyes by closing her heavy eyes. His fingers spread across her clothes shoulder, and he drapes an arm around her waist. She allows him to pull her into his body without question and without speech. She feels her long, springy hair tangle around them like a web, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

The bed dips, and Noah reaches across her body. The lamplight vanishes, and he settles back beside her.

He whispers something in her ear, because she can feel his warm breath hit her skin, just before he presses a delicate kiss to her temple, and she allows the dark to finally submerge her. 


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s the morning after Elisabeth’s birthday, and she accidentally makes Noah bleed.

It’s Noah that attempts to wake her at some ridiculous hour of the morning.

Elisabeth was torn between the haziness of the dream she was fastened to, and the coaxing touch of his palm against her cheek. She had dreamt she was in the woods, naked and bounding barefoot into a stream, attempting to ensnare a little brown rabbit with rare icy eyes, when she becomes semi-conscious of her surroundings. 

Elisabeth breathes in, and smells Noah in the pillow she had her face buried into. She turns her head slightly, eyes sealed shut, but awake behind them. His alluring palm at her cheek disappears from her skin. 

Beneath the addictive warmth of the bedsheets, she reaches out a slow hand across the surface of the mattress to where Noah would have slept beside her, feeling for him, but only finds his absence. She felt dreadfully tired. 

Noah’s thumb swipes her cheekbone, repeating that same physical mantra, circling her skin, a persuasive attempt at waking her. _No_ , Elisabeth thinks. _Go away._

He presses harder, fingers annoying now, and she opens her eyes with blurred vision and meets the bluishness of the room, including the watery figure of Noah, who was lingering over her like a ghost in waiting. She bats his hand away from her, rolls onto her side, turns her back to him, and coils into a ball under the duvet. 

He taps her several times. She doesn’t move. _Go away._ He shakes her shoulder. She only mumbles. _Stop_. Then the bed dips, and his weight vanishes from the space beside her, but it’s not enough to stir her again. _Finally_. 

It’s only when he rips the duvet off her body does Elisabeth voice a noise of disapproval, but she refuses to move. 

She doesn’t open her eyes. Sleep was afraid to let her go, and she was afraid to let it leave. 

A minute ensues, and she thinks Noah has given up on coaxing her awake, and her body begins to sink back into blissful unconsciousness—until a familiar hand gropes her rear. Warm, dry fingers dig into the plushness of her exposed flesh, and for the very first time, Elisabeth could honestly admit Noah had inflicted a sliver of pain to her. Her gut rivets between the foreign discomfort, and the strange, torrential part of her innate psyche that had _liked_ his forceful conduct.

Despite her lack of awareness, she could fully decipher the horror she felt toward herself in that split moment of bizarre contemplation. She didn’t know she was capable of gravitating toward such discomforting affection. 

Elisabeth lets out a sharp cry of annoyance. Her eyes flash open, sore and stiff, and she rolls over violently, slaps Noah’s hand away from her with such force that she feels her palm sting, sits upright, and shouts at the top of her lungs. “CREEP—”

Noah claps a heavy hand over her mouth. 

Elisabeth glares at him, breathing hard under his palm pressed against her lips. He smelled of cheap washing detergent and dried sweat. That boyish softness within his skin still lingered. 

She swallows, and very gently, with an apprehension she could feel within his fingers, he takes his hand away, in fear of her screaming at him the second he surrendered. They silently stare at one another in the moonlit dark, bodies alert, young and alive. 

She was quietly perplexed at how Noah had been able to get her attention; _how_ he knew to get her attention. She somewhat begrudged him for it.

Elisabeth blinks owlishly.

“ _It’s half five. In the morning_.” Noah signs with emphasis, his gestures wide and slow. “ _You need to leave. Before anyone sees you—_ ”

She pushes his hands away from her, defiant. There was enough time to leave later. She didn’t have the patience to listen to him. It was too fucking early.

Elisabeth rubs her eyes, and feels her previous tiredness overcome her once more. It was then she realised how physically uncomfortable she felt. The room was cold. The sweatshirt she wore had been pulled across her collar bone. Her shorts rode up her groin. The desperate desire to take her clothes off hit her like a kick to the stomach.

She glances around the darkened room, disorientated. Her throat felt dry. Noah’s fingers grasp her chin, and he tenderly coerces her to look at him.

“You need to _go_.” He says. “I’ll take you downstairs. Okay?”

Elisabeth clenches her jaw, and she shakes her head at him. He purses his lips at her. All at once she finds him clutching a handful of her hair, close to her scalp, and he unforgivingly pulls her to her feet. She whines at him. Regardless of his assertiveness, he handled her with an insistent care. It was as though she were a child being manoeuvred about by its parent.

Noah ushers her into the bathroom, holding her upright so she didn’t stumble with the sleep that refused to let go of her. Elisabeth squeezes her eyes shut when he flicks on the bright, hard light, and she feels his hand at the back of her neck.

He forces her to bend over the sink, and she inherently pushes against his weight, and her breath audibly hitches at the back of her throat when he knocks the tap on and splashes chilling cold water up to her face.

Elisabeth sharply throws her head back then, in shock of how painfully cold the water was, and she feels the back of her head collide with Noah’s face. His grasp on her body instantly vanishes.

She felt the water dribble down her throat and slide underneath the front of her sweatshirt. She complains momentarily, visibly pissed off, and awkward in her clothes.

She angrily yanks the clothing over the top of her head, a burst of wild, unbound blonde hair whirling after her, and she catches sight of herself in the mirror above the sink. The garish light of the bathroom made her naked skin paler than it seemed.

Elisabeth could see how the water glistened down her chest. The faintest of freckles, bestowed by the summer sun, littered her sternum, and a muted tan line stretched just above her supple breasts.

Her eyes then fall on Noah, who was stood adjacent in the background, like a darkened figure of her past, with his back pressed against the wall. He had a hand covering his mouth and nose, and his half-bewildered gaze was cast to the bathroom floor.

Elisabeth watches him take his hand away from his face, and a tremendous amount of guilt bombards her gut. His nose was bloodied. She whips herself around to face him, lips parted as though she were about to speak, a ball of angst blocking her throat, and she swallows hard. Her hands grip the edge of the sink behind her. She’s unsure of what to say.

Noah blinks a couple of times, his senses clearly knocked, and his eyes land on her bare chest.

He looks at her, then, while the little dribble of blood crawled down his prominent Cupid’s bow and slipped under his upper lip, his pale, muted eyes strangely doe-like and dazed. Elisabeth felt like crying. This was the first time she had hurt him. She had made Noah _bleed_.

They stand in silence for several seconds, absorbing what had just happened. Then, to both her horror and alarm, Noah starts to laugh—in contempt of the obvious pain he was experiencing, it was clear he was feeling genuine levity at the same time.

A flash of exhausted anger ignited within her, and she shoves the balled sweatshirt to his chest.

“ _Fuck you_.” Elisabeth signs, unconscious of the fact he was still semi-enrapt with her bareness at such an early hour, and Noah only smiles as she goes to march out of the bathroom, face gently bruised and alight with a puerile nerve—but when she least expects it, he snags her by the arm and pulls her straight back to him.

He pulls her against his body, until they were pressed against one another. The cotton of his t-shirt against her breasts felt comfortingly warm, like his bed. He settles one hand at her lower back. She watches, half-horrified and half-mesmerised, how the blood trickled down his lips with slow, thickening ease. Noah smiles at her, plainly tired under the blaring light, and was trying to suppress his laughter.

He bunches up the sweatshirt and uses it to wipe away the blood from his nose. It smears across his cheek a little, and left a deep, reddish blush along his upper lip. Elisabeth thought it looked like smudged lipstick. The idea of Noah wearing minimal make-up made her insides fuzzy; he would look even more unusually beautiful, for sure.

He scrunches his nose, sniffs a little. He then pats along her naked collarbone, using the sweatshirt to rid the water that clung to her skin. “I like this.” He says, and his eyes flick to meet hers. “It’s very romantic.”

The dry comment strikes a humorous chord within Elisabeth’s belly, and it makes her laugh despite the weird mixture of five o’clock grogginess. He kisses her softly. She could taste his blood. 

* * *

“ _I’m sorry_.” Elisabeth says for the fifth time in a row, sulking, with her blonde hair pulled forward to cover her chest, once Noah’s nosebleed finally ceased.

“Stop it.” He replies, tossing the last bloodied tissue into the bathroom bin. “I’m okay now. Don’t worry.”   


He glances at himself in the mirror, and smooths the backs of his fingers against the underside of his chin, checking for stubble. He drags a hand through the front of his hair, the little scar near his temple visible for a fraction of a second, until his hair flops back down again. 

He turns to her. “I thought it was kind of funny. You head-butted me.”

“ _I didn’t find it funny_.” Elisabeth shoots, still annoyed at herself. She couldn’t bare the thought of hurting Noah, even if the harm was as small as this. She didn’t like seeing blood. She felt a vagueness toward it. 

“I’ll give you one of my t-shirts to put on.” He says, and tugs her out of the bathroom. “You’ll catch a chill.” 

He opens one of his drawers and takes out a white top. Elisabeth pulls it over her head, and before she can poke her arms through the holes he’s pulling a heavy grey hoodie over her. She feels like melting into his hands when he helps gather her hair that was stuck, and when he tugs the hoodie down the rest of her body. She felt as though she were a plastic doll being dressed by its owner. 

Noah cups her face, thumbs resting at her cheeks, and his eyes bore into hers. “Promise me you’ll dress properly next time.”

Elisabeth nods. He lets go of her. 

When they reach the darkened, sleeping lobby, Noah pulls Elisabeth into a hug, and wraps his wiry arms around her small waist. She shuts her eyes and breathes him in, body light against his, and she feels his chest rise beneath her. 

“ _I wish you had a car_.” She tells him. “ _Then you could drive me home all the time._ ”

“Maybe one day.” Noah says, and kisses her forehead. He has to pry her off him. “Run back home, now. _Vamoose_.”

Before she slips through the exit, she signs him another quick apology, suppressing a giddy laugh when he playfully threatens to do more than grope her awake the next time she falls asleep beside him. He tells her she’s officially fifteen. 

“ _A year closer to death_.” Elisabeth adds sarcastically, with an impish roll of her eyes. 

“ _No_.” Noah signs, and shakes his head, tired eyes strangely bright. “ _You’re a year closer to heaven_.”  
  


* * *

“Oh, _fuck_.”

The curse comes quite naturally to her when she’s stood outside the backdoor of the house, her left hand refusing to believe that the door was locked shut.

“Fuck.” Elisabeth repeats under her breath, her mind blank. She blinks several times. There was no use attempting to get through the front door; it was always locked. She swears once more and clenches her jaw in thought.

She had never been caught leaving the house before, in her many times of sneaking out to see Noah. The only person that was half-aware about her nightly escapades was Franziska—but she would never inform their mother about that. The sisters each had an equal amount of blackmail they could use against one another, if that were ever to occur. A sibling-feud would be unleashed, and neither of them desired that.

Charlotte must have gotten up for the bathroom in the middle of the night, and probably had one of those paranoia-filled moments where she checked that all the doors were locked in case the house were to be burgled, even though the crime rate within Winden was next to nothing—and as a member of the local police force, Charlotte _knew_ that.

Elisabeth looks up to her bedroom window. She couldn’t climb up there. The construction of the house wouldn’t allow it, and she didn’t trust herself to not fall. Besides, she always kept her window locked.

_Fuck_ , Elisabeth thinks for the third time, when she settles on a reluctant solution that made her uneasy. Her eyes begrudgingly roll up to meet her sister’s bedroom window, and she swallows. She finds some gravel on the ground, and picks out the smallest stones before aiming for the glass.

She flings four handfuls of the shale at the panes before the curtains behind them whip open, and the sudden movement startles her. The stiff window is pushed up, and Franziska peers out of it, her bed-disheveled auburn hair hanging round her neck, and she squints. 

Elisabeth watches in apprehension at how her sister’s threatening eyes widen in realisation. Franziska doesn’t react, but Elisabeth could feel the extent of her intensity from outside the house.

“ _Wait there_.” Franziska signs, her gestures sharp, and she shuts the window.

_ Please don’t kill me. _

Elisabeth flits to the step of the backdoor when she sees the handle twitch, and it opens to reveal Franziska stood in her pyjamas, her gaze withdrawn and visibly judgmental.

_ Please, please don’t kill me.  _

No words are exchanged when their eyes meet.

_ Please, please, please don’t kill me. _

Elisabeth slides past her as she carefully shuts the door behind them, and as she steps beyond the door frame and into the house, she’s set on scampering away down the hallway and upstairs, but Franziska grabs one of her spindly arms before any of that can happen, and hurtles her back.

Elisabeth had never felt so terrified in her life. She feels Franziska’s arms enclose around all angles of her body in an awfully rigid embrace. She breathes Elisabeth in, slow and deep, as though they were both subservient canines to some unknown alpha, exchanging each other’s scent, gaging whether or not one of them was a threat.

It hits her then. Franziska was smelling the clothes she wore. And the clothes weren’t hers. The clothes were Noah’s.

Elisabeth immediately wangles herself free from her sister’s entanglement. She sends her a defensive glower, in preparation for the argument that was about to ensue between them, but strangely, that never came. That didn’t happen at all.

The glare vanishes from Elisabeth’s eyes in that moment, when she notices how Franziska’s face softens; the protectiveness within her gaze never left, however.

She shakes her head, then, as if to say whatever. “ _Keep those clothes hidden_.” She signs. “ _Mom will know you’re seeing someone. If she finds them_.”

Elisabeth nods, desperate to get to her room. She hastily takes off her boots and sets them at the backdoor before silently zipping up the stairs, before Franziska can even reach the landing.

She falls back onto her bed, sinuous blonde hair sprawling about her shoulders as she stares up at the ceiling, feeling both elated and awed.

_Thank God._

After a moment of empty thought, Elisabeth moves her hand into the hoodie pocket, and takes out the thaumatrope Noah had made for her. Lovely, gentle, quiet Noah.

She holds the peculiar item above her, pinching it by its strings. She twirls it, spellbound with the delicacy of the drawings, and can’t help but smile.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth gets her ears pierced, and reflects on her relationship with Noah. She thinks Magnus would make a good brother-in-law, one day.

“How are my two favourite women doing?”

Elisabeth was thinking about whether Noah had ever had anything pierced in his teenage years, when she feels Magnus dotingly pinch the side of her cheek. His fingers were cold but soft. He pecks Franziska on the lips before wedging himself between the sisters under the bus shelter. The height difference between them all was rather comical. 

“ _Good_.” Elisabeth answers, when she notices her sister rapidly typing something into her phone. Magnus grins at her. 

“ _Excited?_ ” He signs. She shrugs a little, and sends him a half-smile. 

She was happy that Magnus had wanted to come with her and Franziska to get her ears pierced. He was like a mediator of sorts, one that eliminated any awkwardness or disagreements that would ensue between the sisters. He was a boy, after all. Boys didn’t really care about anything. 

Charlotte had given Elisabeth the money for her piercings a few days ago, and Franziska had been in charge of booking an appointment with the local tattoo parlour situated in the town. On their walk to the bus shelter, Magnus told Elisabeth how a piercing gun had the potential to jam someone’s ear, and why a needle was the safest alternative. Franziska had told him off for giving such a detailed description (boys would be boys), but Elisabeth wasn’t bothered in the slightest—she just internally squirmed for a little while after that, feeling queasy at the thought of her earlobes being absolutely obliterated by a machine the piercer wasn’t even in control of, until they reached the bus shelter. 

“I think it’s going to rain when we get there.” Magnus yawns, and checks the time on his phone. “And the fucking bus is ten minutes late.”

“We’ll be indoors for most of the time.” Franziska replies, and slips her own phone into her coat pocket, and folds her arms across her chest. She shuts her eyes momentarily, and rests her head against the side of the shelter. “We’re going to the parlour. Then home.”

Elisabeth watches Magnus click his tongue. “We’ll see about that.”

“Since when did you make plans?”

“Since now. I want to get ice cream afterward. I have _money_.”

“Good for you.”

“You should be happy for me. It hasn’t vanished on weed, for once.”

“Congratulations, then.”

Elisabeth’s eyes flick back and forth between the two, just about able to catch half of the conversation. Magnus notices her inquisition, and his eyes suddenly widen, as though a lightbulb had appeared above his head. 

“Holy _fuck_ ,” He begins, and claps a hand down on Elisabeth’s shoulder in realisation, his pupils pin-pricks against his pale irises. He excitedly whips his head to Franziska. “Elisabeth has never had a spliff. We should do an initiation. With the whole group. At the lake! When it’s super warm and hot, in summer. At _night_. Wouldn’t that be so fucking cool? We could toast _marshmallows_.”

In contempt of how jagged his and Franziska’s relationship could be, Elisabeth secretly thought Magnus would one day make the ideal brother-in-law. She loved being with her sister and him. It was like having a second pair of parents, ones that were crazier than the first, and ones where she could afford to be her unrestrained self. 

Well, almost. 

Even though they had never properly spoken about it, Elisabeth’s intuition was strong enough to know when her sister still hadn’t made up her mind on someone.

Franziska still couldn’t decide on Noah. 

* * *

Elisabeth’s eyes never left the woodland scenery they passed on the bus. The sky was grey and clouded, but bright, and the air was cold and still, as though were traveling through a pendulous atmosphere that refused to move. She could feel all around her that the bus drive was a quiet one. The coniferous trees they passed behind the windows reached for the sky, and the woodland terrain smoothed out occasionally alongside the wide fluid road.

The forest reminded Elisabeth of Noah.

Wild, reticent and beautifully predatory in more ways than one—Noah was a little spirit full of wanderlust, and was also many other things she had yet to uncover. She breathes on the window she was gazing out of, and lazily draws the outline of a crouching rabbit with her index finger. The glass felt wintry against her skin.

She lets out a yelp of surprise when Magnus curls his arms around her waist,and he pulls her straight onto his lap. Her knees bump the plastic shells of the seats in front of them, and her body turns rigid when he squeezes her like she was his own kin, his embrace brotherly and fatherly at the same time.

She now understood why Franziska often complained about how physically irritating Magnus was to be around, although she could relate with his touchiness, but for different reasons. Being predominantly physical was another way of communication for Elisabeth.

“She’s not that heavy.” Magnus says, his hard, boney knees moving beneath her thighs, and Elisabeth realises he and her sister must have been discussing something while she was peering out the bus window.

_I’m fifteen_ , she thinks flatly, _and he still treats me like I’m ten._

“You’ll bruise her if you handle her like that.” Franziska comments from the seat next to them. Magnus objects.

“Nah. She’s tough,” he turns to Elisabeth for her approval, almost smothering her with his amiability, and sends her a toothy grin. “I bet you could crush a guy’s dick if you wanted to.”

Elisabeth nods, just to humour him. Regardless of how annoying Magnus could be, she loved it when he fussed with her. She felt she was too old to relive the same familial love her father had once given her, especially and now that Peter and Charlotte had split; there was an undeniable estrangement that settled there, albeit a strong one.

Betrayal, in all forms, was a deal breaker for Elisabeth.

Being fussed by boys that were similar in age to her now replaced the fatherly love she was once given.

She glances down at her waist to see Magnus’ arms still wrapped around her waist. She quickly catches sight of the permanent ink etched into his hand; it was a little stick-and-poke tattoo of a safety pin.

She runs her finger over his inked skin. She curiously drags her nail against the drawing, and Magnus whips his hand away from her at the feeling, a laugh escaping his lips. Elisabeth thought Franziska was joking when she said Magnus had some tattoos.

“Here,” he says, and pulls up his jacket sleeve to his forearm, revealing a line of sharp, inked lettering. **_DON’T GROW UP_** , Elisabeth reads, **_ITS A TRAP_**. She then watches him tug down the front of his sweatshirt collar a little, revealing the tattooed feathered head of a Caduceus.

“ _Did it hurt?_ ” She signs. Magnus’ eyes flit from her hands to her face. He shrugs, and for a moment purses his lips together in thought.

“Imagine a cat,” he says, and makes a clawing gesture with one of his hands. “Scratching you in one place for a long time. Over and over. And then nothing. No feeling, at the end.”

Elisabeth reads his lips before nodding, and unconsciously wondered if Noah had any tattoos.

He had the lithe, beautiful, natural body to carry one, if he wasn’t already inked. She imagined him having a verse of old-world Latin written somewhere, a few sentences of a religious passage, or a little symbol of sorts drawn into one intimate expanse of his skin. Maybe a little humble crucifix, half the size of his thumb, etched somewhere secret. He wasn’t the type to flaunt himself.

In the midst of being squeezed like she was a newborn child, and Magnus mentioning how if Jonas forgot to use a condom he would want Martha to have a boy, Elisabeth continued to mull over Noah. Saying she loved him was an understatement. The attraction she felt was something more otherworldly than love—it was an allegiance of sorts, one that stretched both the boundary and concept of time and space altogether.

_Maybe I’m just obsessed with him_ , she thinks, and wiggles her way out of Magnus’ clutch and back to the bus window. The town’s streets were coming into view, and the thickness of Winden’s forest was beginning to disappear.

_Maybe I just love him too much_ , she sighs through her nose, _I hope he loves me more._

* * *

It’s a young man of twenty-five that pierces her ears, and she couldn’t help but stare with fascination at the spherical titanium jewellery lodged in his right brow. He must have noticed her inquisition, because the next time he glances at her he laughs a little.

The man takes out a pen, and dots both her ears, and holds up a mirror for her approval. Elisabeth nodded once, and watched him unbox two sterilised needles. Several moments later he’s clamping her left earlobe with another tool, and she stares ahead of herself in silent anticipation, eyes glued to one cream wall of the little room he had taken her into, sat achingly still in a black, cushiony salon chair.

From her periphery she sees the man say something to her. “Ready?”

Her eyes roll shut the moment she feels the needle puncture through her skin, and the process is awfully fast and penetrating as he goes to clamp her right ear, after fiddling a titanium labret through the previous fresh incision. 

Elisabeth’s mind instinctively flickered to the mental image of Noah’s room at the tavern, in a response to the twinging discomfort, and she envisions a parallel version of herself sat upright in his unmade bed, him holding a wine cork behind her earlobe and a sterilised safety pin pinched between his fingers.

Her gut bloomed with warmth at the thought of them having had several drinks. She couldn’t imagine herself handling alcohol well. Noah would be giddy. Their bodies would be fuzzy with the stupid thrill of it all—and they would love it, even if a little pain was involved. 

“All done.”

Elisabeth blinks, and finds the man stood in front of her holding the mirror from before. Both her ears throbbed, as though someone had boxed her across the face. 

She glances at herself in the mirror, and sees two silver balls neatly perched against her earlobes, both in perfect symmetry. She thanks the man, both mouthing and signing her reply with a smile, before following him out of the room and back into the studio. 

Once the session had been paid and they were back outside on the street, Franziska pulls Elisabeth aside and cups her face. Her eyes flit from one piercing to the other, not once meeting her sister’s owlish gaze. 

“You look cute.” Franziksa smiles warmly, and pinches her cheeks a little. Elisabeth smiles back. 

“Cute?” Magnus repeats, and wedges himself between them in disagreement, and turns to Elisabeth. “She’s _stunning_ ,” he pauses, and a familiar, teasing grin slid across his lips. He glances at his girlfriend. “I bet Noah would—”

“Right, we’re leaving.” Franziska cuts him off as though she hadn’t even heard what he was going to say, and he balks at her momentarily for ignoring him. Elisabeth represses her laugh. “When does the next bus get here?”

“Screw you.” Magnus frowns at her, and grasps Elisabeth by the wrist. He tugs her so close until she stumbles into him. “We’re getting ice cream first. I told you before.”

“We can’t.” Franziksa says, her voice visibly flat. “I told my mom we’d be back for two o’clock. Who the hell gets ice cream when it’s cold?”

“Who the hell said ice cream was seasonal?” Magnus counters, and then, with a dash of cheek that had to be adored, “I’ll buy for you and Elisabeth. Okay? Besides, your mother fucking loves me. I know she’s secretly rooting for me to be your future husband.”

* * *

“ _My sister and her friends are going out tomorrow_.”

It had been several months after the chilly day at the tattoo parlour.

Elisabeth signs the words with hesitancy, after autumn, after winter, and after spring, a month and a bit into the new summer of the new year, when Noah mentions how warm it was, his lithe fingers reaching up above their heads into the canopy of leaves that hung over them on their forest walk.

“And?” He replies with a yawn, pale eyes only needing a moment’s glance to read her gestures—and she could still understand him, even when he gaped. He shakes his head a little and runs a careless hand through his hair. It needed a trim. An inch would do. He looked good with a bit of length. Elisabeth noticed that his hair had gotten considerably lighter with the sun bleaching its colour, which gave it more warm, golden undertones.

She glances away from him, and takes in their surroundings as she tries to find the right words. She didn’t want to sound desperate. But then again, Noah was never afraid to sound desperate, so it didn’t matter. He was raw and unrefined to the bone, matter-of-fact and could be beautifully edgeless when he wanted to be. She was allowed to be like that too.

“Go on, wild girl,” Noah says, the beginning of a cheeky smile crawling onto his lips, the mild touch of his fingertips at the back of her neck more than enough to pull Elisabeth from her thoughts. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

She swallows before looking at him with a fixed gaze. “ _You said last summer we should go to the lake. For a swim_.”

Noah’s eyes flick to meet hers, and they stop walking. A gentle breeze passes between them, and several thin strands of Elisabeth’s hair float across her eyes.

“Yeah.” Noah says, and he tries not to glance her up and down, as though he were repressing a primitive hunger for something she wasn’t ready for. “I remember. You can swim, right?”

Elisabeth blinks, taken aback slightly, and she rolls her eyes at him. She continues to walk and he follows after her. “ _Of course I can swim. I wouldn’t have suggested it if I couldn’t_.”

Noah smiles a little, absorbing every inch of girlishness that emitted from her. “I was just wondering. Lakes can be dangerous, you know.” He teases gently, and he grins, toothy canines the first to be seen.

Elisabeth had thought once, that a year (or less) wasn’t enough time to change and develop, but when she looked back on her fifteenth birthday and compared it to the present time—change had definitely occurred. She wanted Noah more than ever, now. But she had never said anything about it to him.

Throughout the autumn, winter and spring she never once mentioned when “ _ it _ ”  would happen. He hadn’t said anything either. 

But Elisabeth could read Noah like an open book—all of his words were laid bare on blank pages; permanent, overwhelming, and sore to the eyes.

She knew when he thought about her. He knew when she thought about him.

And she would be turning sixteen, soon.

“ _Tomorrow we’ll go to the lake. That’s our plan._ ” Noah signs, and stops at an old oak tree. Something sparks his interest, because she sees his lips part in recognition at what he had seen. He moves a gentle hand to touch the rippled bark, and Elisabeth watches with furrowed brows at how he presses his index finger into one of the many thin crevices. He takes his hand away then, slowly, and turns his palm around so she could see.

A polished little ladybird crawled along the tip of his finger, and loitered across his nail. Noah glances to her. Elisabeth smiles at him with warmth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates are taking so long at the moment, I apologise for that (._.) I’d like to thank every reader that’s taking their time to read my work, I can’t tell you how much that means to me ;-; kudos and comments are much appreciated, thank you so much <3


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth is unable to contain her excitement, but she suppresses it, so she can pretend to be an adult. She’s never seen the male body before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ll be splitting the lake scene into another one or two chapters, because hot cliffhangers are the best, no?

The next day was a Sunday. 

The second Elisabeth opened her eyes to meet the brilliant, glowing yellow that filled her room from the sun behind her shut curtains, a note of elation filled her gut almost instantly, and she sat upright in her bed, pulling one of the dropped straps of her vest back up her shoulder. 

_The lake_ , is the first thing she thinks. _Swimming. With Noah._

She sinks her teeth into her bottom lip to prevent the ridiculous smile that threatened to show on her face. She breathes deep, her stomach flipping once—at the thought of Noah pulling his t-shirt over the top of his head, and unbuttoning the front of his jeans, skin pearly and toothsome—and swings her legs out of her bed. 

Elisabeth checks the time. It had just turned eight o’clock. She was never up this early, especially on Sundays, and she didn’t feel very tired. Soft, muted adrenaline rested within her blood as she got up and opened her wardrobe. Before she forgets, she takes out two towels and finds a drawstring bag to stuff them into, before pulling on a hoodie and some socks to go downstairs for breakfast. She stops for a second to grab a hair tie. 

When she enters the kitchen, Elisabeth saw that her mother was already up and dressed in casual attire. Charlotte was sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, several documents laid out in front of her. She was nibbling on the end of a pen. A gentle crease of concentration rested at her brow, but when she heard Elisabeth’s padding footsteps she glanced up, and the frown on her face smoothed into a smile. 

She sets down her pen before signing. “ _Good morning_.“

Elisabeth sends her mother a weary wave before going to open the fridge, and spots a glass jug of pancake mix. She glances at her mother, who had gotten up from the table, and her morning dreariness faded. 

“There’s fresh fruit you can have.” Charlotte says, nodding to the bottom drawer in the fridge. “Maple syrup is in the cupboard. You should surprise Franziska and make her something, before she leaves for the bus.”

_That’s good_ , she thinks and nods, and her mother presses a quick kiss to her temple before going back to the table to gather her work. Elisabeth was privily jubilant that Franziska was still meeting with the group in town, and she tries her hardest not to seem too eager to get breakfast over with. 

All she could think about was Noah, when she lifted out the freshly made pancake mix from the fridge, along with the crisp blueberries, and thought back to when she nearly set the smoke alarm off in his room at the tavern. She had never seen him so panicked, and at the boyish age of fourteen she found the dilemma entertaining and comical. 

“I didn’t know you could be so sweet.” Franziska mutters, when she shuffles into the kitchen fifteen minutes later, spotting the plate Elisabeth had prepared for her on the counter. 

“ _How long will you be out?_ ” Elisabeth signs. She watches her sister pop a blueberry into her mouth. 

“A couple of hours?” She says with a shrug, and goes to eat another. “I don’t know. Are you sure you don’t want to come with us? Mikkel might be there.”

Elisabeth swallows faintly. Little Houdini dressed as a skeleton with a messy mop of hazel hair. Mikkel was never bothered by her absence. She had never been bothered when he wasn’t there with the rest of the group, either. She sometimes figured that Franziska was always inclined to assume that just because Mikkel was close in age with her suddenly made them the best of friends. 

Elisabeth breathes in as she checks the underside of the pancake that was cooking. She glances back at her sister, and, without trying to rouse her suspicion, she shakes her head dismissively. 

Franziksa watches her for a moment, gently calculative, her early morning eyes still wide and piercing as ever (despite her grim exterior), when Elisabeth goes to turn off the hob’s heat. Even though she couldn’t hear anything, she could feel the mild, silent suspense that hung between them, when she slips the pancake off the pan and onto the prepared plate. 

“ _You’re welcome_.” Elisabeth signs, when Franziska doesn’t say anything. She had been staring for too long, and must have forgotten what she was thinking about. Thank God for morning tiredness, otherwise Elisabeth would have been subjected to a list of questions she’d refuse to answer. 

“Oh, yeah,” Franziksa shakes her head. “Thanks.“

Charlotte rushes off into the lounge to take a phone call when the two sit at the kitchen table. When Elisabeth finishes her glass of milk Franziska mentions that Magnus wanted to do some baking. 

“The next time Mom allows him to come over, we’ll make something. Maybe get pizza. Or we could make that too.” Franziska explains, eyes downcast at her now empty plate. She glides her index finger into some leftover syrup.

It came to Elisabeth then, like dustsettling against a solid surface; she wondered what her world would be like if Noah was the same age as the likes of Magnus and Jonas. 

She wondered what their relationship would be like if he was her boyfriend, both committed and deeply in love with her, for twenty-four hours a day, per week, per month—and per forever. 

She wondered what he would feel like pressed against her, in her childhood bedroom with the lights out, laid on the same single mattress she had slept on when she was a little girl. 

Elisabeth wondered, with a gentle, coaxing note of arousal blooming within her belly, how Noah would orchestrate himself around her in her own home. If she was the age he wanted her to be, and if her mother and sister were nowhere to be seen in the house, Elisabeth quickly established that her bedroom would never feel the same again. 

“Elisabeth.”

She blinks twice when she feels Franziska poke the back of her hand with the end of a fork. “Are you listening to me?” Her sister repeats. 

“ _What did you say?_ ” Elisabeth signs. “ _I wasn’t looking._ ”

Franziska suddenly hesitates when she goes to reply. After a moment of internal reflection, her brow softens, and she waves a dismissive hand. She goes to pick up her plate. “Never mind.” She concludes. “I’ll see you later?”

Elisabeth nods once, and decided not to pry. Prying only lead to suspicion—when it was with her sister. 

* * *

The air was warm and wonderfully humid when Elisabeth left the house with her packed bag slung over one shoulder, and the sun had just reached its highest point in the sparsely clouded sky. 

She ties her hair into a bun as she walks, and wipes her brow with the back of her hand, her skin already feeling moist and supple with the heat that beat down upon her. She was glad she had attempted to wax the majority of her body last night—she wanted to look and feel like silk in human form. When Franziska had been fifteen, she accidentally made herself bleed the first time she used wax strips. Elisabeth felt a cheeky slither of victory when she finished the process thankfully unscathed.

She had chosen to dress light, wearing an oversized t-shirt and shorts, but not only for the beautiful weather. She had purposely not packed a swimsuit, remembering what Noah had said to her the first time they visited the lake together, his words beautifully shameless: _you don’t need one._

The paranoid part of her then wondered if he had been joking when he said that, but then she immediately denied it, because she recalled the alluring intensity within his gaze when he said the words, genuine from the beginning and to the end. 

Noah’s door opens before she’s able to knock, and they stare at one another in bewilderment, taking in each other’s appearance, and the observant gazes on their faces. He was dressed in a plain white t-shirt and denim cutoffs; his rucksack hung from his fingers. His hair was a little messy, but she liked it like that. She noticed the collar of his top was slightly stretched to one side. His bones were lovely.

“Hi.” Noah says with a small grin, eyes flicking her up and down. 

“ _Hi yourself_.” Elisabeth signs, and he ushers her backwards to shut the door behind him. He leans down to peck her cheek. 

When they exited the tavern and were out on the street, Noah led Elisabeth to the back of the building, and mentioned that one of his co-workers from the pub said they could use his bike for the afternoon. 

“You’re small. And light,” Noah begins, as Elisabeth watches him steady himself on the bike, pulling the rucksack onto his back. “You should be able to fit here.” He indicates to the middle of the handlebars. 

Elisabeth quirks one corner of her lip, skeptical at the idea. Hitching a ride on the front or back of a bicycle looked awfully simple in the many films and television shows she had seen as a child, but the first time she had attempted the art was with Franziska, a few years ago, and they both somehow ended up with cut knees and grazed palms. 

“ _I don’t know_.” She signs, uncertain. Noah’s tongue around the inside of his cheek, waiting for her to decide. 

“C’mon.” He urges with a provocative smile. “You sit here. I’ll rest my chin on your shoulder and kiss your neck. You’ll love it.”

She folds her arms at him, and he stares her down, eyes glittering impishly; still patiently waiting for the moment she would give in. 

“Well?” He adds, shortly after. 

“ _Fine_.”

He grins, and unable to ignore his boyish glee, she smiles a little when she hoists herself between the handlebars. Noah’s balance wavers momentarily, when he starts to push forward—he purposely makes the bike wobble for a second, and Elisabeth shouts his name and attempts to elbow him in the ribs. 

Noah only laughs, and nuzzles his nose into the crook of her neck. She watches his lips move from the very edges of her periphery. 

“You need to relax, _wild girl_.” He tells her, his voice husky and soft against her cheek, suddenly seeming so much more mature than he actually was. Despite being audibly blind to all of his vocal sensuality, Noah had a psychic way of making Elisabeth feel things she had never felt since birth. “I’m the last person that would let you fall.”

* * *

When they reach the lake, Elisabeth eagerly hops off the handlebars, rubs the backs of her naked thighs and stretches her arms high above her head. She lets her head fall back, and she peers up through the green foliage of the trees that stood just before the open sandbank that opened up to the inviting, glistering water of the lake. 

Noah props the bike against one of the trees before putting his rucksack in the shade, and he takes out a rolled-up towel. Elisabeth does the same, and watches him from where she was stood in the sand, under the heat, and under the golden sun. The air was humid, and it hung still at all angles around them. She watches him kick off his shoes, and he approaches her.

“Just us.” Noah says, once they were sat on the towels against the doughy sand.

Elisabeth is unsure of what to say, now that they were sat beside one another, blessed with such beautiful scenery and a privacy she had been yearning for since the beginning. She rubs her bare arms, even though she was far from being cold. A tender awkwardness overcomes her body, but Noah immediately crushes it with his wordless charm.

He gets up from the towels, and Elisabeth, with her knees pressed against her chest and innocent, girlish eyes drawn to his physique, watches him as he pulls off his t-shirt.

_Fuck_ , she thinks. _Just, fuck._

She had imagined this before. And it was _happening_.

Her eyes suddenly falter from his body when he goes to take off his shorts. She casts a sideways glance in the opposite direction, and the next time she catches a glimpse of him she can’t help but stare with a mesmerism she had never experienced until now.

It’s the first time she’s seen the male body in person, and she tries not make her purity seem so obvious to him, and she swallows down her nerves and glances away from him again, unable to keep herself together. In what way was she meant to conduct herself in this kind of situation? A slither of envy then poked her insides; how did Noah find it so easy to dive into the deep end?

_Maybe he just doesn’t care_ , she decides to herself. _I want to be like that, too._

“Hey,” Noah says. From the corner of her eyes she sees his lips move, and she hesitantly meets his gaze. “Remember something for me, will you?”

Elisabeth nods, heart pounding against her ribs, unable to absorb the fact that he was stood stark naked in front of her—and in a passing moment, she couldn’t quite believe that she would be, too.

Noah sends her a gentle look, a small, cheeky smile threatening to show at his lips, and takes a few steps back, his intense eyes beckoning her to follow his lead. “We only become naked when lust is involved.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth finds herself intimidating a quietly flustered Noah. She realises just how cruel she can be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparat’s “The Lake” inspired me for this chapter. Super mellow and dreamy. Take a listen, if you’re into that stuff ;)

_We only become naked when lust is involved_ , Elisabeth repeats in her head, realising how true the words were, and at the same time being met with the spiralling hint of irony.

Her relationship with Noah felt as though it had been laced with desire from the very start, ever since she had became aware of bodies and the beauty of intimacy—and now he was telling her to forget about all of that; for now, at least, just to enjoy the present time and appreciate their surroundings. 

She could do that.

_I can do that_ , she swallows. 

Noah had slipped into the water without her noticing as she thought to herself. His hair was shiny and slick, and seemed more brown than blonde now that it was wet. His eyelashes looked dark against his cool eyes. He was even prettier like this. It was as though the water had revealed his true form—his being slippery and charmingly transient in every way. 

Elisabeth gets to her feet. She tells him to turn around. Noah sinks further into the water, as though he were proposing a silent compromise, his eyes only to be seen above the glassy surface. _Pretend I’m not here_ , his silence says. 

“ _You’re not allowed to look_.” Elisabeth signs, and he rolls his eyes at her. She watches the water close over the top of his head, and the visual quiet that ensues makes her think for a fraction of a second if he was even real. The way in which he had cryptically vanished beneath the lake’s surface had her dangerously captivated. 

But a minute afterward, he appears again, eyes closed, skin silken and wet, his whole being breaking the still water with a phantasmal gentleness that made her gut swoon. 

When Noah’s eyes are no longer against her, Elisabeth begins to undress. She unties her hair and pulls off her clothes, glancing back every so often to see if he was peeking, but not once did he turn to steal a glimpse. 

It felt foreign to be naked under the sun, feeling the balmy breeze sift around the delicately boyish curves of her body, but the butterflies within her settle when she approaches the water, step by step, until it begins to consume her shins and knees, and eventually her whole body, leaving her collarbone and shoulders on show. 

The water didn’t feel cold, but it wasn’t overly warm, either. That was because the lake was considerably immense. It didn’t harbour much heat, even in the summer. The shallow shore would be a little lukewarm, and the ponds would be stagnant and tepid, but inland, where the lake was deep and thick with dark waterweed and still life, it was undeniably cold.

Elisabeth swims out to Noah, and she dives under to soak her hair, the sensation of being totally submerged a relaxant. 

“Your cheeks are pink.” Noah says, when they’re opposite one another. “You’re acting as though you’ve never seen the male body.”

It hits her then, quickly and quietly, and she realises Noah had misinterpreted the scene. Did he really think she was _that_ experienced?

She’s unable to sign due to the depth of water they were swimming in, but she attempts to speak with her eyes—sending him a look as if to say: _I haven’t._

Noah stops short. “Wait—you’ve never seen…?”

_What makes you think I have?_ She wonders, and she feels herself smile at how tangled he had become. Elisabeth shakes her head, and Noah rubs his face in embarrassment. She laughs. 

Noah had been her first for almost everything. He had unknowingly adopted a vital role within her life. He has been a necessary piece to her coming-of-age. Noah was important, and he always would be. 

His face is red the next time she looks at him, and he was smiling with the anxiety of it all. His neck and collarbone were blushed pink. He purses his lips, speechless, totally lost for words, and Elisabeth can’t help but laugh. She was half-flattered at his assumption; maybe Noah didn’t completely see her as some naive, virgin teenager. Perhaps he interpreted her curiosity as experience—intimate knowledge she had gained from someone that didn’t even exist. But it was just her. Just Elisabeth. 

She then realised that Noah held a fraction of naivety, just like she did. As much as she loved to think that she was cosying up against a man, Noah’s youthful personality said otherwise. He was a boy at heart, just like Magnus, Bartosz and Jonas. 

“ _What do you think of me?_ ” Elisabeth signs, when they had swam back into shallow water. She could feel the soft waterweed curl around her toes. It was warmer where the lakeside was. 

Half a moment later she felt stupid for asking him the question; Noah must have seen loads of naked girls, ones that were probably stunning, with soft, hourglass bodies that were so much more feminine and womanly than Elisabeth’s. 

She knew Noah had a way of playing with women, and flirting with customers for extra tips when he was behind the bar wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg. If she found his allurement whimsical and playful, she couldn’t begin to imagine what he was like with girls his own age—or older. That was beyond Elisabeth’s playground, and beyond her safety. That kind of game lay way past the fencing. 

_He’s probably slept with them too_ , Elisabeth mentally concludes, with a note of defeat. She felt foolish for even thinking she was the sole female in his life. 

Noah swims close to her then, a soft frown cast across his comely face, his question rhetorical. “What do I think of you?”

Elisabeth doesn’t say anything. But she watches him. 

“I’ve never met anyone quite like you before.” He says, blinking once, lips parting. The primitive urge to lunge and lock lips with him hammered her insides when her eyes trailed down his wet, naked throat, and along his tender collar. 

“ _That’s all?_ ” Elisabeth blurts, both mouthing and gesturing her reply. 

Noah laughs. “What do you mean, that’s all?”

The carefree mood between them began to change, and she can see how his voice softens with thought, from the way his supple lips move to form the next few words. 

“What else do you want me to say?” He adds. 

“ _I don’t know_.” She signs, and brushes her response off with a mild smile. “ _Tell me I’m pretty, or something_.”

“I can do a lot more than that, for you.”

_Does he even remember what he told me before?_ She thinks, half-absently. _I guess we’re all at the mercy of attraction._

The reality sinks into her head the second she registers his words, like a ship’s anchor meeting the seabed, allowing its weight to be consumed by something so vast and limitless. She realises how beautiful he looks in front of her, slick with water, eyelashes damp, his skin young and heavenly. Noah was trapped right within his prime. Elisabeth was experiencing him at his most handsome. 

She aspired to be as free as he was. Unbound from anything and everything. 

“ _What is more important?_ ” She asks him. Noah blinks, and watches her intently as she continues. “ _When you say you love me. What is more important?_ “

He doesn’t seem to understand, because he furrows his brows at her. Elisabeth thinks to herself. She peers down into the water that engulfed her naked body. She didn’t want to sound so desperate, so childishly paranoid, so hungry for acknowledgement. 

“ _The inside or the outside?_ ” She questions, hesitant. 

Noah breathes out, and he swims even closer, until the space between their bare bodies is reduced to several inches. 

“When I say I love you,” Noah begins, and Elisabeth feels him press two fingers to her exposed sternum, under the water. Her heart pounds. He could see everything. “I am in love with your soul,” He searches her face for a moment, then pulls his fingers away from her chest. “Not your body,” He brushes a lock of her wet hair behind her ear. “That would not be love.”

“ _I see both, with you_.” She signs back, and Noah grins. He glances down into the water. His cheeks were tinted pink the next time he meets her eyes. 

“…I’ve yet to see the same with you.” He answers, words calculative. “Maybe you could show me—“ he stops and swallows, and Elisabeth can see the internal embarrassment appear on his face. She felt at instant ease to see him like this, when he behaved like a boy wanting to appeal to a girl so badly.

It was innocent. They could both be prey, together. 

“I mean, you don’t _have_ to, but if you wanted to.” He was rambling now. “No pressure. I can wait. I can hold my self-control. Can’t hold my alcohol very well, though.”

Elisabeth giggles at him. She felt like the roles between them had switched. She had the upper hand, now, and she was going to take advantage of it. She leans into him with hooded eyes, and Noah becomes enchanted almost instantly. His hungry gaze lingers against her lips; she lures him close until she feels his breath hit her bottom lip—before splashing water in his face. 

* * *

Noah is the first to get out of the water, after conversing with Elisabeth for what felt like eternity, when in actuality it was only an hour and a half. They dashed water across each other’s faces. Elisabeth had swaddled her arms around his neck, and he had smoothed his palms down her lower back.

She had mentioned to him how Bartosz used to joke that a woman once drowned in the lake. Noah had said that anything was possible. Half an hour later while the two treaded deep water, he had swam beneath without her realising, and grabbed both of her ankles and jerked her down under—not too far under, but just enough to give her a playful scare. Elisabeth swore at him, and Noah had peppered her face in wet kisses.

“Don’t stay in too long.” Noah says, when he swims for the lakeside. “I’ll get lonely.”

Elisabeth rolls her eyes at him, and he sends her a look that shouted: _it’s true._ She observes him as he withdraws from the water, his muscle delicate and natural beneath his skin. She tries not to smile at the sight, even though he had his back to her. Her gut bubbles with giddiness as he picks up his towel, and he briefly dries off before pulling on his shorts, and sits back on the towels, topless and facing the lake—facing Elisabeth—across the small stretch of still water that divided them.

She can see him close his eyes. He combs back his damp hair with his fingers, and soaks up the sun, which would colour him well, and just enough.

Elisabeth stays in the water for what felt like an extra fifteen minutes. She relished the feeling of floating on her back, the water filling her ears, and covering every expanse of her body but her face. The sky above was a cloudless, perfect blue.

Infrequently, when she sensed Noah’s eyes against her, she would stretch herself out as she floated to test his tolerance, and she’d feel the cool air lick at her exposed breasts that broke the soft surface of the lake.

He knows when she’s about to get out, because she makes it obvious. Elisabeth runs both her palms over her scalp to smooth back the wet hair from her face, before turning halfway to meet Noah’s observant stare. She holds his gaze as she swims to the sandbank, and very slowly, the water becomes shallow at her shoulders.

And then it reduces to her chest. And then her waist. And then soon her knees—until she’s stood bare and unclad, wearing nothing but a coy smile, the sun making the water that plastered her body gleam under the golden light, as though she had been glossed with a thin layer of glistening varnish.

The lake’s rippling waves circle her ankles as Elisabeth goes to squeeze the water out of her hair. Her eyes never leave his. She felt as though she had backed him into a corner with no means of escape, just by revealing natural ammunition.

It greatly amused her how she could hide when she physically desired him, and how he couldn’t in most situations, and she was unsure if she should feel pity for him, including the rest of the male population within his age. When he was encouraged, poor Noah was like a hound in heat—and Elisabeth could see that he was battling a war against temptation in his head, through his pale, wintry, fixated eyes.

Having a girl on the cusp of sixteen, in the best part of her existence stood before him, young, blossoming, at her most fertile, with everything just in the correct, most natural proportion, and knowing with a hint of titillating arousal that the only person that’s ever touched her intimately had to be herself—must have been the biggest temptation yet.

When the thought entered her head, Elisabeth found it undeniably primitive. Perhaps sexually uncivilised, at a push. 

But that was what desire was. That was desire at its most raw and unrefined. Desire had no limits.   


It simply gave—and had the potential to take, when it wanted to be cruel, and Elisabeth knew how to be cruel. She could be like a paper-cut, subtle but aggravating.

She watches with concealed surprise at how Noah severs his eyes away from her, an aura of respect emitting from him, but Elisabeth saw it all back-to-front. She _wanted_ him to look at her like that. Being wanted with that look cast all over her was something she knew she would grow to savour.

It was empowering, to be wanted. It was _liberating_. And youth could only give that.

At one instance in her life, Elisabeth had been skeptical about the age difference between them. She had never been scared or unnerved by it, but she had always been wary of its controversy. 

She now happened to like the thrilling contrast that divided them in that way; the fact that Noah had never really been a boy of seventeen, but a young man—one who seemed to be at the mercy of a girl who was just two years shy of being ten years younger than him.

_Shit_ , Elisabeth thinks, her thoughts reeling. She feels her gut nose-dive to her groin at the intoxicating complexity of it all. There was so much. Maybe a little too much.

She reaches down to pick up her towel, and pats her face dry before rubbing down the rest of her body, glancing through her periphery to see if Noah was stealing glimpses of her, but he was staring across the lake, eyes hooded and content. Elisabeth pulls on her underwear and then her t-shirt. She attempts to dry the majority of her hair with the towel before sitting down beside him, crossing her bare legs in front of her.

It’s only then does Noah cast a glance in her direction, before gazing back at the lake. They don’t say anything for a minute. He reaches behind the two of them for his rucksack, and takes out two cans of lemonade. He passes her one, the tips of Elisabeth’s fingers brushing his. As he cracks open his can, she watches him speak with a hint of dry humour that made her want to fracture with laughter.

“How dare you do that to me.” Noah says with a shy half-smile, clearly referring to her naked emergence from the lake.

“ _It’s just a body._ ” She signs, before attempting to crack open her lemonade, but she’s unable to get a grip of the soda tab, and her fingers were too soft from swimming.

“It’s _your_ body,” Noah answers, and takes it from her. He cracks it open instantly, creamy bubbles surfacing through the gap. “And you’re fucking gorgeous.”


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth takes a transient trip down memory lane. She touches on a particular subject—and Noah becomes strangely withdrawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO university has hit me like a ton of bricks. Hence the two week delay on this fic. Thank you for all sticking by, it means the absolute world to me knowing I’m making people happy with what I enjoy doing. Your comments also make my day 100x better, and I’m sorry to those that I haven’t gotten round to replying, I’ve been overwhelmed with a lot right now, but I want you to know that I’m always thinking of y’all when I go to upload a chapter <3

She was hungry when she got out of the water.

Elisabeth watches in concentration at how Noah slices up an apple for her, after she asked if he had brought anything to eat. The little switchblade he held worked in unison with his fingers, the sharp edge of the knife so frightening close to his skin, but it never once touching him. He hands her the slices, and she munches on them one by one, as he takes out another apple for himself.

Elisabeth gazes out across the lake as Noah cuts away at the fruit, and ten minutes later, when she’s licking her sticky fingers, she turns to see him carving out part of the skin on one of the few apple wedges he had sliced.

Noah looks up at her, smiling. He shows her the whittled apple slice. He had cut out an elongated triangle from its middle, and she instantly recognised what it looked like; a pair of rabbit’s ears.

He gives it to her, and as she nibbles at it, she can’t help but feel a pang of guilt for eating something so delicately made. Shortly after, she’s sinking her teeth into the end of a peeled banana. She had initially sifted through the small bunch Noah had picked up (along with a box of ripened strawberries) from the local grocery store on their way to the lake, and she was half-aware that she was being watched by him, but she didn’t mind the feeling of his eyes wandering down her. It was a comfort.

“What’s wrong with the others?” Noah had asked, when he noticed her particularity over which banana she had picked.

“ _The ones with more spots are sweeter_.” She answered, and Noah had smiled with a roll of his eyes at her explanation. “ _I like them more._ ”

She quickly went on to suck on the strawberries he had bought for them, tossing the leafy ends into the undergrowth that lay around the surrounding trees. They were warm, and slightly tangy, but she didn’t mind the bitter taste. Noah wasn’t that hungry. She had done more swimming than him.

When she was sat beside him with her bare legs crossed in front of her, wearing nothing but her t-shirt and pale pink underwear, she now looked like a tired, hungry little girl; one that had wide, doe-like eyes, with a pixie-nose and softly chiseled lips. She suddenly didn’t seem like the gleaming, erotic young woman that had emerged from the lake before. The child within her had been impersonating a facade.

Elisabeth feels Noah’s thumb touch the corner of her mouth when she swallows what she was chewing. She flicks her eyes to look at him, and she feels him rub away the strawberry juice from her bottom lip, his movements gentle and doting.

She tries to bite him, and giggles when he retracts his hand from her. He smiles, and they hold one another’s gaze for a minute more, until the playfulness vanishes, and Noah leans in to kiss her with an adoration that could have sent Elisabeth to sleep.

She kisses him back, pressing with a firm, girlish force Noah absorbs. She tastes him. He tastes her. And then she pulls away, and laughs when his lips follow after her, after for more—and there would be only so much left to give before he exhausts her, and without realising, she knows this—because Elisabeth retreats to lie back on the towels they were sat on.

She shuts her eyes as she arches her back, and stretches her arms high above her head, the sun comfortingly warm against her body. She feels her t-shirt rise up her rib cage, and she embraces the feeling, while being fully aware of Noah casting a lingering glance across her exposed skin.

When she opens her eyes, she feels his hand clasp the upper of her naked leg, and her breath catches in her throat. His fingertips carefully wedge themselves between her pressed thighs, and Elisabeth can feel an air of masculine confidence emit from him. He wasn’t hungry, but he was peckish.

Noah crawls close to her, and she can see the soft muscle of his lean arms move beneath his skin. She props herself up on her elbows to meet his attentive gaze, and he dips his head down to place a kiss at her belly. It tickles, but not enough to make her laugh, like it always did. Her stomach visibly dips when he kisses her skin—his lips brushing above the elastic of her underwear. His damp hair trails along her abdomen.

The moment Elisabeth breathes in, Noah’s eyes flick up to meet hers. She felt the primal urge to pull him close and wrap her legs around his hips, but she doesn’t do any of that, despite how her loins ached for physical contact. Despite how much she _wanted_ him. Despite _everything_. And he had noticed her restraint. Why was she restraining herself, when everything around them was perfect?

_This_ was perfect.

Noah pulls away from her then, slowly, and he crosses his legs in front of him. She sits up, somewhat fazed by his eagerness to retract from the intimacy—but it was clear he had found something better to entertain.

“Do you touch yourself?” He asks.

Elisabeth blinks at him. “ _What?_ ”

Noah smiles a little, half-flustered at having to repeat what he had just said. “I asked if you touch yourself.”

_We’ve been here before_ , Elisabeth thinks with childish warmth. She had asked him the same question when she was thirteen, when they were walking in the forest, under autumn trees and under an October sky. Noah’s ears had been burning red.

Elisabeth grins a little at his question, brushes back a lock of drizzled hair to busy herself and buy time to find a reply—even when the answer was on the tip of her tongue, and at the tips of her fingers.

_Yeah, I have_ , she thinks, her conscience feeling artful and underhand. _But why would I give you the pleasure of knowing that?_

The first few times in which she tried, she hadn’t felt much. Through addressing her sporadic arousal for Noah over the years, she realised what the problem was—she had never been in the mood to make it happen during the initial attempts.

Her earliest experience had happened shortly after she turned fifteen. She had came back home in the middle of the night with muddy feet, dressed in her pyjamas and adorned in one of Noah’s grey t-shirts. She very quickly found herself curled in her bed, under the covers, eyes rolled shut, with her hand in the front of her underwear, silently gasping at the thought of Noah’s lithe fingers helping her undress—while breathing in the carnal musk of the addictive, intoxicating scent that was woven within his shirt she wore. 

The lure of it all had been born a few hours before, when the two had visited the caves, and took a clandestine walk through the forest. Elisabeth had felt strangely wanton. She had ran ahead of Noah through the trees and shrubbery, blind to where she was going, but buzzing with the thrill of being unchained and isolated with him in the thick of Winden’s woodland.

She felt as though she could run forever, barefoot and defenceless, the nightly air cold and cutting against her chest, chilling her young lungs every time she sucked in a rasping breath—yet her soul roared with a metaphysical heat that fuelled every ounce of her energy to keep going.

Every few minutes, she would stop, and shed a piece of her clothing for him to find on the forest floor, and was eventually reduced to her underwear—but he found her before she had the opportunity to take them off. Noah appeared breathless and desperate, a predacious glint circling the depths of his blue eyes, grasping Elisabeth’s dangling boots by the laces in one hand, and the latter of her clothes bunched in the other. 

“You’ll freeze.” He said as he stepped forward. He had been unable to look anywhere but at her body, and Elisabeth liked that. She knew she was pretty, but she knew Noah thought her even prettier. 

She had only grinned in the bluish night, the cold unmoving air evading her naked skin. “ _You’re the one that has my clothes._ ”

_He wanted to eat me that night,_ Elisabeth thinks, _and I would have let him._

_ But he chose not to. _

She’s reminded of the memory with such fondness it burns melancholia into her chest, and she remembers with quaking desire the dream she had a week later after that incident.

She had woke before the fantasy of Noah could strip her naked, but her mind had revelled in how he pressed himself against her; hard, hot and throbbing at her stomach, breathing into the crook of her neck. The image of him had embodied the drive of a famished, growling wolf, keen to rip into her.

Elisabeth felt gently titillated by the peculiarity of the violence her mind had birthed. It was the first time she had, not willingly, but unconsciously subjected herself to such vulnerability within her mind’s eye.

_Come on,_ the fantasy of Noah had whispered, teeth appearing when he smiled against her neck, _let me in_ —and then Elisabeth’s eyes flew open, and the bizarreness of the dream vanished.

It felt as though Noah had been there in the flesh, when she sat up in her bed, breathing heavily, the lingering phantom of his warm body still pressed against all angles of her, afraid to let go, as though he were in fear of disappearing forever.

The aftermath of the arousal she felt was twinged with a blue sweetness, and she forced herself back to sleep while still slathered in a thin sticky film of cool sweat.

Elisabeth had fell asleep wondering if Noah had ever woke in the early hours of the morning—all hot and bothered from the singularity of a dream—and wondered if she was ever the reason for his potential midnight arousal, just like how he was hers.

“Elisabeth?”

She blinks twice when she sees Noah’s figure lean into her face, and it takes her a moment to reel herself back to the present and realise he was still waiting patiently for a reply.

“ _Maybe_.” She says, finally, the one-word answer not really compensating for the length of her trip down memory lane, but Noah doesn’t seem to notice that. He was just interested in her every act of effort.

“Is that a yes or a no?” He adds. She grins again.

“ _It’s a maybe_.”

“So, a yes?”

“ _A maybe_.”

She wanted him to wonder. Telling him everything would take away the enigma of her personality, as it would with him (even though Noah never told her much anyway). Making him wonder would trigger him to want her even more.

“ _I want you to touch me_.” She says.

Noah raises his eyebrows. “Touch you? Okay.” He gently bops her on the nose, and she blinks, and frowns at him.

“ _Not like that_.”

Noah swallows. For someone that implies how eager he is to get the girl he likes into bed, when confronted with the reality of it head-on, he would shy away at every given opportunity—and why?

“I know.” He answers, and goes to look back at the lake, but she pokes his arm.

“ _When?_ ” Elisabeth pushes.

He glances back her, eyes soft and somewhat pained. She knew he didn’t like pushing her away. He swallows again. “Soon.”

“ _How soon?_ ”

“Elisabeth,” Noah warns, reluctant. “Just—go along with me for now, will you?”

She couldn’t remember the last time he had set his hands at her shoulders, like he used to do when she were young, when she wanted something she didn’t fully understand. But now it was reoccurring, after being so dormant. It had been a while since they had fallen into the guide-and-child relationship. She thought the teacher and student had died. She thought they had surpassed that phase. She thought she had grown out of it. 

Elisabeth wants to reply with a nonchalant remark, to emphasise how it really didn’t bother her one bit, but she’s unable to contain her irritation. 

“You’re no fun.” She concludes, and turns her head away from him.

She couldn’t understand how he had been kissing her belly earlier, luring her in and out, dangling the bone, and now was taking it all away from her with no explanation. It wasn’t fair.

Noah could be cruel, too. But he was cruel without realising it—which made it all the more painful for her to endure.

She feels Noah touch her shoulder, and without restraint she looks back at him in delicate, naive hope.

“I can promise you something.” He says with an appeasing smile. “It’ll happen when you least expect it.”

He leans in to her face, movements quiet and fluid, his hooded eyes lingering at her lips. “You like surprises, don’t you?”

Elisabeth searches his face. She eventually nods, and he grins. His teeth looked sharp.

He pecks her on the lips. “Good.”

“ _What do you get off to?_ ” She asks unforgivingly. Noah glances at her, and lets out a breathless laugh, in slight embarrassment.

“Are you—is this a serious question?” He replies. This wasn’t a serious question. Nothing is ever a serious question. This was payback on her behalf.

Elisabeth nods. She tries to conceal her smile. It was only fair that she got to ask him something personal, too. “ _Yes. What turns you on?_ ”

Noah laughs. He averts her gaze for a moment, in obvious contemplation, when he realises that Elisabeth had asked the question genuinely. He digs his fingers into the sand they were sat upon. It was an alternative to ripping up grass as he thought.

He sucks on his bottom lip, and he looked suddenly ashamed. “Vulnerability.”

Elisabeth registers the word in her head. _Vulnerability_ , she repeats. Wide open. Naked. Weak. She felt as though the conversation had silently condescended into a confession—and they hadn’t endured a confession in a while.

“ _What kind?_ ” She asks him.

“You.” He says instantly, his response full of bare-skinned truth. “It’s also…everything I’m not. It makes me curious. In— _that_ way.”

_Because it’s everything you_ think _you’re not_ , Elisabeth says in her head, without making her words physical. She adds, “ _Are you saying it’s everything I am?_ ”

Noah watches her calmly. “What do you think?”

Elisabeth doesn’t answer his question. She didn’t have to. She only looks at him, expression blank, hands and voice mute. Her psychology wasn’t wrong in conjuring up the facade of Noah dressed as a pale-eyed canine with fine white teeth; his admitted desires seemed to agree with her.

Yet, Noah had proved he was no predator. Elisabeth had seen his limitless capability for gentleness. He was plain, quiet, unassuming Noah. Just Noah.

_Unless he’s both_ , she thinks, the words falling into her head like hurricane rain becoming one with the sea.

When a thick blanket of cloud blocks the sun, the golden light that had initially set the lake and sand alight faded. A mild, cool breeze brushed past Elisabeth’s bare arms, and she watches the air skim across the lake’s surface, like a million invisible pebbles grazing the face of the water.

Noah turns his back to her as he reaches across to pick up his t-shirt. He had felt the chill, too. Elisabeth watches him fondly, and quietly admires how his shoulder blades jut outwards as he goes to pull the shirt over his head.

But just before that, her eyes happen to settle on something she hadn’t noticed before.

A small mark, maybe half the size of her thumb, sat at the nape of his lovely neck, almost flawlessly aligned with his spine.

The mark was a symbol—a triquetra.

Upon initial observation, a little jolt of excitement struck the pit of her belly like lightening at the thought of the symbol being a tattoo. Elisabeth had wondered with glee if Noah had any little drawings inked into his skin, just like Magnus did. It would suit Noah’s personality wonderfully.

However, when she looked closer, she rephrased everything she had assumed, because it didn’t seem to be a tattoo. There was no ink. She didn’t _think_ it was ink.

Something unsettling blooms within her body the second she reaches out to him, and the tips of her fingers touch the little shape.

_It’s his skin_.

Noah whips a hand to the back of his neck in the blink of an eye when she touches him, and he turns violently in defence, eyes wide and pupils narrowing, the lightheartedness they had been previously entertaining shattering like glass against concrete, and Elisabeth jumps back in shock at his sudden movement.

For a ridiculous minute, she thinks he’s about to hit her. But then she sees how wounded he looked; all crouched, one knee pressed against his chest, half-covered by the t-shirt he had yet to pull down over the rest of his body.

She felt the primitive urge to lunge forward and envelop him in her arms, and she briefly imagines herself gently pulling him out of the animal trap he had blindly and happily leapt into. The trap she had set.

As quick as it had happened, Noah’s eyes soften, and he withdraws himself from the heightened state. He blinks a couple of times, glancing away from Elisabeth as he continues to pull the top over his head. She watches him swallow as he casts his gaze into his lap, preoccupied with something that seemed to be more important than her.

“ _What is that?_ ” She asks, a few seconds after, when he was aware of her again. He had turned to face her fully now, and the little triquetra was out of sight.

Noah somehow summons the courage to pretend to be dumb. “What’s what?”

“ _The thing on your neck_.” Elisabeth presses.

“It’s a mark.”

“ _But it’s in the shape of a symbol._ ”

“I know.”

“ _Then what is it?_ ”

“A mistake.”

She watches him pull his knees to his chest, and he turns again until he’s facing the lake. Elisabeth took in the melancholic beauty of his profile. His lips were fine, and his cheekbones were high and angular. His nose was straight.

“We are animals too.” He says, as though he had answered a nonexistent question, the explanation vague but fitting for his reserved demeanour, including the ambiguity he had unintentionally encouraged. “We’re just more evolved than the rest.”


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noah begins to open up. Elisabeth takes him back home—to her bedroom.

_We are animals too_ , she repeats in her head, looking at Noah with speculative, attentive eyes. This was the man she had fallen in love with, yet when faced with factuality, he was the man she truly knew nothing about—and he purposely kept it that way.

Yes, everyone has secrets. Everyone keeps them. Elisabeth has them, too. That was a vital and essential part of being human. It was what made the human individual. 

_But you know everything about me, and I know so little about you._

She knew Noah as the shy young man that dressed minimally, picked up his findings from thrift stores, lived and worked a freelance life and enjoyed his own company; he was the man that had quiet roots with spirituality, and embodied an unreadable face and an unconditional love that was reserved only for her.

Elisabeth was unsure whether or not Noah’s sudden, withdrawn demeanour made her want to distrust him. However, she felt nothing but a new prod of desire instead of doubt. It was the desire to pull him apart, the need to be more situated within his life, the want to be the centre of his everything and anything—until all that would eventually matter to him would be her, and not what seemed to be his past, and whatever else he was anchoring beneath his surface.

_There wouldn’t be enough room for secrets then_ , Elisabeth thinks.

The next time she looks to Noah she finds him staring right at her, as though she had been saying all of her thoughts aloud for him to hear, but he was just observing, like he usually did. It was a hobby for the both of them actually, to be as watchful as predators over prey, because Elisabeth loved studying him too (especially when he wasn’t aware that he was being observed). Watching one another was a shared pastime.

Before Noah has the chance to turn his head away, Elisabeth drops a question she had never properly thought of until now, with slight unfolding surprise. “ _How did you learn sign language?_ ”

“My mother,” Noah begins, blinking a couple of times in thought. She hadn’t expected him to reply so quickly. He casts his eyes to the sand. “She had a close friend that was deaf. She was an older woman, with very short hair. Blonde,” he pauses to look back at Elisabeth, eyes soft and full of an unpredictable adoration just for her. “Just like you.”

“ _Did she teach you?_ ”

A little smile tugs at the corners of Noah’s mouth in obvious, warm remembrance. She was glad he was still able to smile. He had his tail between his legs not long ago. “Yeah. I asked her. My mother knew quite a bit as well. They both taught me.”

“ _But why?_ ” Elisabeth adds.

Noah shrugs, shakes his head a little. He breathes in. “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to—and it’s stuck with me ever since. I was maybe four years old at the time. I liked the way you had to move your fingers and hands. It was amazing. Beautiful.”

Elisabeth sucks on her bottom lip as she read the words that rolled off his tongue. 

A bitter reminder of some sort then washes over his face, and a little crease forms between his brows. He glances back to the lake, and adds, “Do you—believe in coincidences?”

Elisabeth blinks. “ _What do you mean?_ ”

“The idea that everything is predetermined.” Noah answers, almost instantly, and she spots a glint of radicalisation ignite within the depths of his pale eyes. “Everything that has happened was meant to happen. All for a reason.”

Elisabeth wants to laugh at that. She liked seeing him get all wrapt with deep topics such as this. He was rarely enthusiastic about certain things, unless it was about his camera, the world of nature, the church, and Elisabeth. She thought it was borderline mad to become so fanatical over what sounded like pure imagination and sport—but he looked like a boy when he subjected himself to these kind of discussions, and that was something Elisabeth experienced infrequently.

The only madness that was present was them: a contemporary couple—a duo that was bonded by controversy, and a curiosity for the other. Two hearts. One body. One soul. 

“ _If that’s true_ ,” Elisabeth answers whimsically, indulging in his enthusiasm, “ _then I feel like we’ve met before_.”

A look of calculative seriousness crosses Noah’s face, as though he had thought of the same thing. “Really? Me too.”

Elisabeth chuckles a little. “ _I said it as a joke._ ”

“It didn’t sound like a joke.”

She holds his gaze for a moment longer as he waits for a reply, but she doesn’t give him one. She decides not to. Not every conversation had to have a closure.Some weren’t meant to have one. 

She leans forward to press a kiss to his cheek, and he shuts his eyes at the feeling, dimples appearing as he sent her a small smile. 

They’re packing up their belongings when Elisabeth notices a minimal bracelet clinging to Noah’s right wrist. She initially thought it was a hair tie of some description, but when she looked closer, it was a little red leather cord that had multiple tiny wooden beads threaded along it. There was a frayed tassel at the end, where it could be both tied and untied. 

When Noah caught her gaze, he told her it was a prayer bracelet, and that each wooden bead had a prayer spoken over it. He thought he had lost the item until he found it in the back pocket of his jeans. He and Agnes used to make them together as children. Sentimentality filled Elisabeth to the brim when he mentioned that his sister had in fact, made the one he was wearing. Agnes used to make some for the girls she secretly liked in school. 

“ _What does it symbolise?_ ” Elisabeth asks.

“Protection.” Noah answers, and laughs a little without mirth. “It hasn’t really done much for me.”

_“You’ll have to show me how to make one. It’s cute._ ” 

Noah smiles at her. He glances down at the beaded cord on his wrist, and unties it. She frowns softly at him, and sends him a questioning look. 

“I don’t have to.” He says, and hands it to her. “This one can be yours. From me to you.”

Elisabeth’s cheeks turned pink with quiet glee. Noah helped tie it round her bandy wrist. He had to make three knots instead of one, so the cord wouldn’t slip off her limb.

“What are you doing next week?” Noah asks, as he watches Elisabeth attempt to shake the sand from her damp hair, once they had packed their bags. 

“ _School_.” She signs, and goes to pull on her shorts. 

“What about the weekend?”

She stops as she takes off her t-shirt to put on her bralette. “ _I’m not sure. Magnus might be coming over. Get a phone. We could message each other_.”

“No.” He replies, and glances away to giveher some privacy. She struggles for a moment to blindly hook the clasp together at her back, and Noah must have heard her futile attempts, because he motions her to turn around so he can help. 

“ _I could send you pictures, if you get a phone_.” She continues, after he had hooked the clasp together. 

“Of what?”

She nibbles her lip. “ _Anything you like_.”

Noah raises one brow at her suggestion, catching onto the implication straight away. “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”

“ _Your loss_.” She adds with a coy grin, and pulls her top back on. 

“We’re not going to be fucking any time soon, if that’s what you’re implying.” He says, laughing humourlessly, his self-control for once seeming like a cast iron rod. “You can just dream until then.”

“ _I’ll drop by if I’m free_.” She signs, and reaches up to kiss his cheek, her pressure just as firm as her mother’s. Noah turns his head and catches her lips, and their noses bump. When she goes to break away from him he pulls her back hungrily, and she muffles out his name against his lips, giggling. She says she has to go home, and he offers to take her back. 

* * *

Noah had nuzzled his face into her neck many times when they cycled back. He annoyed her when they were leaving the forest trail, though Elisabeth secretly enjoyed every ounce of his affection irritation, but that quickly subsided when he violently pressed the bike’s breaks upon the sudden emergence of a crow—when it burst through the foliage above their heads, and the grinding halt sent Elisabeth lurching to the forest floor with a hard thud. 

She thankfully landed against the soft, dry earth, and her forearms took the majority of the impact. When she got up and brushed herself down she was simmering with irritation, but once she turned round to face Noah she immediately wanted to crack up with laughter; his expression was priceless. 

“Holy— _fuck_ ,” he blurts, entire body frozen, knuckles white against the bike’s handlebars. “Are you okay? I really didn’t mean to do that, I promise. The, um, bird—”

“ _It’s fine_.” Elisabeth signs, and wipes away the dried mud from her palms. She desperately tries to contain her laughter when she settles herself onto the front of the bike again, but Noah immediately inquires after her. 

“Why are you laughing?” He questions inquisitively, face peering against the side of her cheek, a little too close for her liking, but he doesn’t care about what she likes right now. It was him and his questions that apparently mattered. “You just fell. It looked painful. Wasn’t it painful? Tell me.”

_You’re so stupid_ , she thinks, and is unable to prevent herself from grinning. “ _Forget it. I’m fine. Now, take me home_.”

They reached Elisabeth’s neighbourhood in the space of fifteen minutes, and she directed him which street to turn down when the trees and lampposts and other quaint little houses became familiar to her.She tells him to cycle round the back of her home.

“Looks like I’ve got a return ticket for the inn.” He says playfully, when she hops off the front of the bike. She rubs the backs of her thighs and pulls her bag further up her shoulder. 

“I’ll see you soon?” He adds, already settling his right foot on one of the peddles. 

Elisabeth opens her mouth, as though she were about to say something, but she closes it when she registers what he had said. She glances behind her, to the back of her house. Her eyes land on the backdoor. Her grip on her bag tightens with thought. 

Charlotte was at work. 

Franziska wouldn’t be back for another couple of hours. 

Elisabeth had the house to herself. 

“ _You can…come in._ ” She says. “ _If you want._ ”

Noah stops. Their eyes meet. He doesn’t reply for a minute. She watches his gaze flick past her shoulder to her house, then back to her. Then to the ground. He gnaws the inside of his lip in mental debate. Then, finally: “Are you sure?”

She nods. 

“What about your mother? Your sister?”

She shakes her head. “ _Mom is at work. Sister in town._ ”

Noah blinks a couple of times. She could see he was stuck at crossroad within his head. He swallows. “Okay. Just for a bit.”

* * *

Noah pauses when he reaches the threshold of the backdoor frame, the smooth, clean kitchen tiles a contrast against the faded material of his canvas shoes. He must have taken a black marker to them at some point, because Elisabeth notices a tiny smiley face drawn close to the tied laces.

He stands as though he were waiting for a formal invitation, like a vampire, though not an eloquent one; his stature became suddenly awkward as soon as he stepped foot into the kitchen. His face became boyishly observant, his shoulders sloped a little, and the man Elisabeth had been drawn to from the very beginning fell asleep, and gave birth to a young person of her own age.

Noah slips his shoes off at the backdoor. He leaves his bag on his back, and Elisabeth gets them a glass of water each. Much to her surprise he downs his within a few seconds, and wipes the corner of his mouth with one knuckle. They don’t say anything for a while.

Well, Noah doesn’t, but his subdued nature didn’t bother her at all. It amused her, being gradually shown the many layers of his psychology, the variety of emotions and notions he was often projected through when confronted with something that exceeded his knowledge; Elisabeth’s domestic environment now seemed to be one of them.

She then realised that this was the first time he had ever stepped foot into her home. Into her space. Into her domain. Into her foxhole. She had always been the one to dip in and out of his domesticity, and it had never been the other way around—until now.

She follows him around her own house, a metre behind him as he wandered through open doorframes and glanced out windows. Elisabeth felt as though they were the same age, but trapped in opposing bodies that quickly became the catalyst of their moral divide.

She watches Noah attentively, as he observes the family photos that both hung and sat in the living room. He runs the tip of his index finger down one of the photos of Elisabeth, and mimics the youthful curvature of her eight year old face. The ghost of a smile appears on his lips. He glances back at her with soft eyes of recognition. They exchange no words, and he looks back to the photos.

“Your father?” He asks a moment later, and points to an upright framed photograph of Peter and a seventeen year old Franziska. Elisabeth nods as she nears his side, a note of melancholy jabbing her in the lungs. Her cheek brushes Noah’s arm, and she swallows at the feeling of his skin against her parted lips. His fingers find hers, very quickly and quietly, and he holds her hand.

Charlotte had taken down all of the photos of her and Peter together. She only left the ones of him with the children on show. Elisabeth had often wondered where she put them, or where she had hidden them.

“You have your father’s softness.” Noah says, glancing down at her. “And your mother’s inquisitive eyes. A wonderful combination.”

Elisabeth grins, and, with her fingers still tightly entwined with his own, she pulls him out of the living room and to the landing of the staircase. She feels Noah falter, like a horse refusing to jump the poles, when he realises where she wanted to take him, but she keeps pulling him, and his strength disappears with defeat.

She takes him to her bedroom, and shuts the door behind them. Noah drops his bag to the floor, and watches her as he gravitates toward the middle of the room, wide-eyed and discerning his surroundings.

He looked out of place in her environment. He didn’t look right here. Well, a twenty year old man in a young girl’s bedroom wasn’t meant to look “right” anyway, but this was different.

Noah didn’t suit domesticity at all. His face was meant to be observing the interior of a church, the thick of Winden’s woodland, the city streets and the world’s most crowded and loneliest nightlife—not the slow life of revisiting memories taped to pale girlish walls that weren’t even his own. He suited the continuously rolling, unforgiving environment of the changing, ever-altering world. Noah suited stark reality.

Yet, despite all of that, Elisabeth saw how genuinely interested he was in her life. He wanted to become her everything and anything, too. And in her mind’s eye, Noah made life seem like a dream—he made it seem _desirable_ , when situated in various environments. His perspective on most things was almost like a form of alchemy; he could create metaphysical gold out of nothing, just by using his charisma and enigmatic charm to bring it to life.

_It’s like creation_ , she thinks.

But when Noah touches the photographs that were taped to her bedroom walls, Elisabeth was brought back to Earth, and she noticed, regardless of how wonderful she thought he was, there was a fraction of Noah that was rooted deep within normality.

He probably didn’t see himself the way she did—he probably doesn’t even think about any of those things—but that was the way it was. Everyone liked to think that their lover or companion was the most extraordinary being that ever walked the Earth. But not all of that was true. That was a dream. It would only ever be a dream, too.

Elisabeth’s fanatical thoughts dissolve when she catches Noah staring at something. He had found a photograph of the group altogether, outside under the sun, laid on a stretch of grass. It was one of Elisabeth’s favourite photos. Martha had bought a little disposable camera that day, and they had all packed a picnic to take to the forest, to celebrate the last days of school. Elisabeth had realised that day she and Mikkel would be the only ones out of the group that would be going back to school. Everyone else would be going to college or university.

“ _Do you remember who is who?_ ” Elisabeth asks him with a smile, when she notices that he had been staring long and hard at this particular photograph the most.

He nods and prods his finger at the milky, grinning complexion of Jonas. “That’s Jonas.”

Elisabeth blinks, slightly bewildered. “ _That was fast_.”

“You said he had blonde hair. I remember him as the only blonde.” He goes on to name the others. “Magnus. Martha. Michael?”

“ _Mikkel_.” Elisabeth corrects, and he nods once more before looking back at the photo.

“Ah, right. And—“ he pauses when his finger lingers over the soft profile of Bartosz, and Noah’s face immediately changes, but not much; only enough for Elisabeth to notice that something else had made its way into the forefront of his mind.

“ _Something wrong?_ ” She asks him.

Noah shakes his head, and breathes in quietly. “No. It’s just—“ he stops and attempts to find the right words, jaw clenching and throat bobbing, “—he and my father—share the same name.”

Elisabeth’s eyes widen at his words. “ _No way! Really?_ ”

“…Yeah.” He says slowly, face unreadable. “It’s a really small world.”

This was the first time he mentioned he had a father, and Elisabeth could feel a familiar tension emit from Noah as he continued to stare at the photograph, almost enrapt in a sort of trance, like he was refusing to believe something. His eyes eventually wander across the image, his movements rather reluctant, and he pokes at it again. She wanted his fingers to poke elsewhere.

“Franziska,” he points, “and you.”

When he turns to her, Elisabeth greets him with a firm kiss and latches her hands onto his forearms. She refuses to let go, and she feels Noah still beneath her grasp, and he takes a step backwards.

He kisses her gently in return and tilts his head to one side, and she feels his chin press against hers, and their tongues meet for a split second, until Noah’s hands find themselves cupping her delicate face. He pulls away to gage her expression, swallowing with an apprehension Elisabeth had never seen before. He looked visibly nervous.

Perhaps it was because they weren’t in his room at the tavern. In his bed. Under his sheets. Adorned in his clothes. All with the little crucifix dangling from the lamp, watching over them. Noah had never been thrust into her environment before. This was all so new. Not so different, but _new_.

Elisabeth searches his face, and her eyes settle back on his lips, and she pushes forward again. It’s as though Noah turns to water when she guides him to her bed, and he sits down on the edge of the mattress, unusually docile, his weight foreignly heavy against it.

She tugs at the collar of his t-shirt, and he immediately goes to pull it over the top of his head. His skin had been sun-kissed, similar to that of the subtle golden colour of sweet, mellow syrup. His fingers rest at her hips as she goes to pull off her top, bright blonde hair bursting round her naked shoulders.

His hands clasp the curvature of her rib cage at either sides, and he pulls her close, teeth visible between his parted lips, until their abdomens press together—until they could feel one another’s heat. She straddles him, and his hands flit down to grasp her thighs that locked at his hips, and he smiles that stupid smile, the playful, half-embarrassed daring one, the one that made him look like a sixteen year old boy and not a twenty-three year old man.

Elisabeth’s heart thuds in her throat when she feels him snake his fingers along the expanse of her back, and he unclasps the the hooks of her little white bralette. Less than an hour ago he had been helping her put it on, not taking it off. He leans in to kiss her neck, and she turns her head to bury her nose into his hair as his lips dance across her skin. He smelled of dry water, grass, the sand, and faint musky drugstore deodorant.

His mouth grazes her breasts, nose bumping against her sternum, disheveled flaxen hair tickling her throat, and his hot breath makes her body shudder in the coolness of her bedroom. Elisabeth swaddles her arms around his neck, and she grinds her hips into his crotch, and he hums with approval against her bare collar. She wonders what it felt like for him. She wonders if he felt the same little burst of heat within the pit of his belly, the same fuzziness that electrified every part of his senses, and the same riveting stab of affection and arousal to his heart.

Elisabeth traces her fingers down the front of his bare chest, nails gently raking against his warm skin, and for the first time, when they meet his zipper, Noah doesn’t push her away—he indulges in her. He was too hungry to fight. He was too enrapt with the reality of them together as one.

Noah goes to kiss Elisabeth the moment she’s about to unzip his fly, and as quick as everything had happened—he stops and freezes in his place, body motionless, like a deer caught in headlights. His eyes flick sideways, past her lingering lips and settle on her bedroom door. Elisabeth searches his narrowing eyes, fingertips stroking his jaw in attempt to make him speak or turn his attention to her, but he doesn’t move.

Then it hits her.

_You’ve heard something_ , she thinks, for a moment imagining him as the hound leading the hunt, the first canine to spot a flash of familiar orange dart within the thickening woods. Her blood suddenly chills.

Elisabeth gets off him. She pulls on her t-shirt. The arousal between them vanishes. Noah stands and fixes the front of his jeans, brows furrowing as he pulls his top back over his head. He swallows.

“ _She’s just came in_.” He signs. “ _She’s on the phone. Downstairs._ ”

Elisabeth frowns, her belly birthing butterflies of anxiety. “ _Who?_ ”

“ _Your mother_.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noah clambers out Elisabeth’s bedroom window. She relays their relationship in their head. Magnus is dragged into the lingerie department.

_Fuck_.

“ _Stay here_.” Is the first thing she feels herself instinctively sign, the panic that was beginning to drown her lungs unbearable to breathe through. Noah rolls his eyes at her, face searching for an escape.

“ _Where the hell else would I go?_ ” He signs back, mouthing the words with a sarcastic note.

Elisabeth ignores him, slips out of her bedroom and shuts the door, for some reason wanting to tiptoe all the way down the hallway while burdening the anxiety of having a young man sat in her childhood bedroom, but she darts down the stairs as fast as she could in case her mother were to step foot on the landing. She glances into the kitchen to check if her mother had came in through the back, but she hadn’t.

_Front door_ , Elisabeth thinks, and meets Charlotte as she emerges from the living room with her mobile pressed to her ear, still in her workwear. When she sees Elisabeth she instantly goes to cut the conversation she was having short.

“I’ll call you back, I have to go now—“ Charlotte stops and blinks, eyes suddenly narrowing with comedic disbelief,”—no, Wöller, it’s my _daughter_ ,” before hanging up. She shakes her head at Elisabeth. “My tolerance for men is practically zero at this rate. I wasn’t joking when I said to be careful when you meet someone you like. How did you know to come down? I was just going upstairs to see if you were home.”

_ Oh, shit. _

Elisabeth sucks on her bottom lip, her mind blank and empty when she scrambles to find a half-decent response. “ _…_ _ I was going to get a drink. Did work finish early? _ ”

Charlotte shakes her head once more, and moves past her daughter into the study. “No. I forgot something.” She signs. “Torben is convinced I’ve left some paperwork he’s after here. I’m going to have a look around.”

“ _ Torben? _ ” Elisabeth spells, with a soft frown.

“Wöller.” Charlotte adds, and her daughter nods. She wasn’t used to her mother naming her work colleagues by their first names. It was like a code of conduct that everyone went by, just like in films.

“Your hair is wet. Did you shower?”

Elisabeth swallows. The image of a naked Noah in the lake pops into her head. “ _I went swimming._ ”

“On your own?”

“ _Yes. I’m going to shower now_.”

Charlotte blinks. “Oh, okay then. If you’re hungry, there’s food in the fridge. Remember to turn off the oven if you use it. I’ll see you later,” she presses a quick kiss to Elisabeth’s temple, “Franziska should be home soon.”

Elisabeth watches her mother briefly, ensuring she was actually sifting through the study’s cabinet drawers before making a beeline for the staircase.

When she enters her room, she finds Noah prepared to clamber out her bedroom window, and a stab of primitive panic pierces her chest.

“ _You’ll fall!_ ” She hisses aloud, half-signing the words as she grabs him by the arm. Both to her annoyance and perplexity he chuckles at her.

“ _It’s fine_ ,” he gestures, “I’ve done this before. I need to leave before she sees me—she’ll notice the bike out back if she goes into the kitchen.” His hands grasp the open window frame, a moment before he realises something. He glances down at his socked feet before looking across to Elisabeth. “I—left my shoes downstairs.”

_Fuck_ , she thinks, and races out of the room, ensuring to bound lightly down the hallway so the noise wouldn’t raise any suspicion with her mother. She scampers into the kitchen, then into the utility room to the backdoor, and snags Noah’s shoes before speeding upstairs once more. She watches Noah pull them on before going to clamber out her open window. 

He turns back to her. “Wait,” he says, and pulls her forward into a quick kiss, fingers grasping onto the fabric of her t-shirt. Elisabeth laughs quietly against his lips, and she feels the ghost of them linger at her skin when he pulls himself away.

“ _Don’t die_.” She signs jokingly.

“That’s the one thing we know for sure that’s coming.” He says, eyes alight, and grasps onto the ledge of the window, and slowly lowers himself down. “We just don’t know when.”

Elisabeth peers down at him, and she watches in silent awe at how he drops to the ground of the back garden with unsettling ease, his movements featherweight and lithe, sandy hair bouncing. Noah glances up at her. 

“ _Love you_.” He signs with a coy smile, and Elisabeth swallows, tongue-tied at the unbound, wonderfully wild sight of him. He fixes his rucksack and picks up the bike before vanishing from her home. 

Elisabeth feels the warm air tickle her forearms. She leans back from her window a moment later, the absence of him suddenly so real, and she turns around to observe her bedroom. It had been a ghost that touched every picture that was taped to her walls. It had been a ghost that had messed up her neat duvet.

It was as though Noah had never been here, kissing her lips, slipping her bra off of her body, glistening mouth against her chest—it was as though her fingers had never been ready to bury themselves into the front of his underwear—all in the surroundings of her beloved bedroom. 

* * *

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, ten minutes until the end of her class, when she begins to doodle minuscule triquetras in the margin of her English book with a red biro. She was thinking about the time when Yasin had told her some of the boys in her class thought she was pretty. They had never thought she was pretty until now.

“ _That’s nice_.” She had said to a smiling Yasin, and was unsure of what else to say. She had just turned fifteen when he told her that, and at one point, Elisabeth would have been over the moon to know the boys in her class liked her that way. It was both a self-esteem and confidence boost.

But ever since she met Noah, everything else—everything that came with being a teenager—seemed so inferior.

Why did it feel so _inferior_?

Elisabeth stops doodling at the thought. It both oddly and suddenly made sense. She understood the difference she had been longing for.

She lifts her head and glances around at the girls in the room. She realises she has surpassed this age. Being fifteen in her world was totally different to what was deemed to be the normality. Normality was the absurdity in her world. Elisabeth’s experience was far more complex than the rest of the girls in her class. Not many girls her age would be inclined to stick with a man that was just two years shy of being twenty-five.

She rarely felt the urge to ask Noah what she meant to him, because half the time she was with him there was no need to ask anything like that. She was happy when they were together, stripped back, hand in hand, and that was all that mattered. She knew Noah was happy too.

But when Elisabeth found herself situated amongst others, and wedged within society as a whole, she often wondered (maybe not consciously) what she _was_ to Noah. What _he_ was to _her_. Were they a couple? A duo? Partners? An item? 

_I’m definitely not his girlfriend_ , she eventually thinks, not really disappointed yet not elated with the idea either, _and he’s definitely not my boyfriend._

She looks up at the clock that hung above the blackboard to the front of the classroom. One minute left. 

_We’ve never really talked about that at all._

* * *

She’s sat beside a reluctant Magnus on the bus into town, after school, thumbing the little beaded bracelet—the one Noah had given her—that was tied tight around her wrist. Franziska and Martha both wanted to go into the local department store to buy some underwear, and Magnus had just wanted to go home, but Franziska insisted on him joining the girls.

Elisabeth hadn’t thought much of it. She was always happy to be around her older friends, knowing with slight mischief that she would be doted on by them no matter what—but every time she found herself slipping into a minute of her own, gazing out the bus window at the passing pine trees, Noah always became the centre of her thoughts. She was beginning to forget the last time when she had _not_ thought of him, and she couldn’t remember the beginning of when he became so important to her. When he became _vital_.

She thinks of the symbol at the nape of his neck, the peculiar little mark that embodied so much delicate detail. It was almost like a birth mark of sorts, it was so naturally embedded into his skin. It was as though he had grown with it, or the mark had grown with him. Elisabeth found it rather pretty.

When she finds herself stood in the women’s section of the open-plan department store, Franziska and Martha go to where the lingerie and sleepwear was displayed. Elisabeth follows after them, not really bothered, and glances through the girlish colours, most of the pinks and purples pale and fluorescent.

She wondered if Noah would approve of the paraphernalia. She wondered for a moment, if he had ever wanted to see her adorned in pretty underwear. All boys liked girls to look pretty in the bedroom, didn’t they?

“I like yellow.” Magnus blurts without context, and she feels his tall stature near her side like a lanky teenage-parent, and she watches him point to a sun-coloured lace bra. A short, dryly comedic silence ensues between them. Elisabeth stares at him blankly. Magnus glances at her, then to the lingerie he had wearily pointed at, then back to her.

He blinks, and a look of realisation washes over his face. “Sorry. I’m being weird.”

A toothy grin spreads across Elisabeth’s face, she shakes her head at him in disagreement, and she poorly suppresses a burst of laughter, which makes Magnus grin in return. He looked out of place stood amongst womanly colours, dressed in black and acid-wash. He looked sleepy. They sit on an elongated pouffe that was situated outside the changing rooms Franziska and Martha were in.

“How are things with Noah?” Magnus asks her.

“ _Good_.” She signs, with a small smile, to gesture positivity to his question.

“How come we never see him?”

“ _He’s shy._ ” She answers, mouthing the words so he understood. An intuitive gaze crosses his face, and he purses his lips a little at her, the corners of his mouth curving into a smile. “ _What?_ ” She adds.

“Nothing.” Magnus says, pale eyes alight with rascality. “I’m happy. For you.”

Elisabeth shrugs her backpack off her shoulder, and pulls it onto her lap and unzips it. She takes out a pen, and a small, pocket-sized notebook. Magnus watches her as she scribbles something down on it before showing it to him.

_**It’s not like that.** _

His eyes flick to meet hers, and he chuckles, unconvinced. “Oh yeah? You should see the colour of your cheeks.”

Elisabeth tries to smile. Magnus was like a big brother. Stupid in the best ways possible. Protective and aggressive in the worst. But it was her sister’s approval that mattered the most.

_**Franziska hates him**_ , she writes.

Magnus smiles at her even more, but this smile was different—this was a gesture of strong disagreement, one that he knew himself was a total myth. He shakes his head at her, blinking.

“That’s not true. She likes him.”

“ _How much?_ ”

“A lot. But she’ll never admit that,” He laughs a little, “because she’s a stubborn bitch.”

Elisabeth nods at him, grins slightly at the “bitch” part of his answer, and she presses the pen into the paper, thoughtful. She swallows.

_**Can I ask you something?**_ She writes.

Magnus nods.

**_What do you call a tattoo that isn’t a tattoo?_ **

He frowns, and blinks, perplexed. He cocks his head.

_**It’s not really a tattoo. But it kind of looks like one? A mark? But in the shape of something.** _

“ _Oh—_ “ His eyes widen in realisation. “—like a brand?”

“ _…A brand?_ ”

“A body brand.” He says, and plucks the notebook and pen from her grasp to write down the next word. He hands it back to her so she could read. His handwriting was heavy and clear.

_**SCARIFICATION.** _

Elisabeth shudders. She had never seen that word before, nor had she attempted to utter out the syllables under her breath with her blind tongue, but she knew what it meant. It was self-explanatory in every way.

“I wanted something like it a while ago,” Magnus goes on with a beam of remembrance, “it looked super cool. But when I saw the process I kinda chickened out. It’s icky-looking. And painful, of course. But if it’s done properly and it heals like it’s meant to, it looks _incredible_ ,” he pauses, and Elisabeth can sense the enthusiasm in his voice fade into a curious concern. “Why are you asking?”

Elisabeth grits her teeth in panic. She hastily writes on the paper.

_**I saw something online about it. I didn’t know what it was. Why would someone want one if it’s painful?** _

“Dedication.” Magnus answers. “If you really want something you’re gonna get it, aren’t you?”

Elisabeth sighs quietly to herself in thought. But what _kind_ of dedication?

“Some people don’t have a choice,” Magnus continues, and she watches how the playfulness in his face becomes strewn with gentle discomfort. “I mean…I thought it only happened to animals. It’s the shit you see in cults and stuff, y’know? But people have glamorised it now.”

Elisabeth blinks. She’s hit with a torrenting wave of deja-vu. Noah had said something that sounded—

_We are animals too._

—just like that.

Elisabeth stares down at her open notebook. She stares at her handwriting, and at the few of Magnus’ half-formed yet understandable words.

This opened up a new domain entirely. She felt so many questions zip straight into her mind, ones that she was so desperate to ask Noah. Questions she had to ask him. She wanted to know everything, and not just the good parts. He had her everything. It was only fair that he gave her his, too.

Elisabeth watches how Magnus’ eyes suddenly widen, and she realises he was staring past her shoulder. She turns round to find her sister and Martha stood.

“Cults?” Franziska repeats, her eyes narrowing at Magnus. “What are you telling my sister about now?”

Magnus stammers. “I swear—you just happened to walk into the conversation at a stupid moment. I’m not a bad influence.”

“I never said that.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

“But I _thought_ it.”

“Fuck’s sake, Fran.”


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elisabeth stays in with Franziska and Magnus. Her education quietly begins to come between her and Noah.

“How big is your oven again?” Magnus asks, his dark, crudely dyed hair falling across his eyes as he crouches down to lift a pound of all-purpose flour from the shopping aisle they were stood in.

“ _Big. Kinda._ ” Elisabeth answers with a small shrug. 

Magnus nods and glances back to the aisle, sucks his cheeks inwards, lips imitating a fish. He hums. “Muffins.”

It was Friday, and Elisabeth had previously told Noah she wouldn’t be able to slip out of the house this weekend to see him, as Magnus was staying over like she had predicted. Wherever he was, Franziska was, and that happened to be at home—which meant Elisabeth’s frequent disappearances would become more easily noticeable, and questionable. Noah had laughed a little at her explanation, and pulled her forward until she felt her chest against his, and said: _one day you won’t have to hide me._

“We’re only making one thing. Remember that. We agreed on making cookies tonight. No muffins.” Franziska drills the reminder into Magnus’ head for what felt like the millionth time. 

“But I’m hungry.”

“We can get a takeout.”

“But what if—“

“No.”

“Fine, _Mom_.” 

They buy two large chocolate bars and some butter, and Magnus attempts to get into a nearby trolley before leaving the supermarket, much to Franziska’s disagreement. Elisabeth found it funny. 

* * *

She finds herself retreating to her bedroom to stare out her window when they get home. It probably wasn’t normal to be thinking about him every minute of the day. Girls her age should be having fun, making plans, discussing boys—not mooning with a too-close-for-comfort curiosity over a man that probably had the upper hand in their relationship. 

She knew some people would call it ‘creepy,’ but it was far from being that. In some ways, it was inexplicable as to what it was.

Despite wanting them to have equal roles, Elisabeth couldn’t help but enjoy Noah being the guide between them. She liked being steered. Being steered meant she had no responsibilities. She didn’t have to think, when she was with him. She could just run on, and have him chase after her for eternity. It was like she was wearing an invisible red cord around her neck; a little dog collar with a lead that was bound to Noah’s wrist. If she went too far, he could always pull her back. He would always pull her back. 

_Noah, Noah_ , Elisabeth repeats, in her head. She parts her lips to mouth his name, bare arms folded against her windowsill. _No-ah_. She wonders what he entertained himself with when she wasn’t there to annoy the life out of him. Books and music and observing nature would become boring, at some point. That wasn’t enough stimulation. Human beings were complex. 

_Perhaps he just lies and waits?_ Elisabeth sucks on her bottom lip. _Like a loyal hound—_

“What are you doing?”

She feels an all too familiar hand tap her shoulder, and she turns around to find Franziska stood behind her. 

“ _Thinking_.” Elisabeth answers. Franziska blinks. A streak of white flour was dusted across her cheek. 

“Come help. Pizza will be here soon.” She says. 

Elisabeth follows her sister downstairs and into the kitchen, and finds Magnus stood at the sink with his inky hair tied back into a small bun. She laughs a little when he turns to meet her. 

“What are you laughing at?” He asks with a soft frown.

“ _Your hair_.” She signs, and points to her own. Magnus grins. 

“I think I suit it. Don’t you?”

“I think you look like a housewife.” Franziska answers. 

Elisabeth helps with rolling the remaining cookie dough into small balls, pressing the odd couple of chocolate chips into their middles. Her palms felt buttery when she finished shaping the dough, and went to wash them as soon as she could. 

Elisabeth is the one to answer the front door, after spotting a small car pull up onto the curb of the street. Magnus rushes into the lounge to find his wallet, and she opens the door to meet a young man, maybe the same age as her sister, that delivers the pizza. 

She’s unsure of how long she’s stood there, fingers in her pockets looking for a few euros to tip him, but it must have been a couple of minutes at least, because the delivery guy has the approachable time to ask if she’s single. 

It takes Elisabeth a moment to register the words that emitted from his lips, and she’s genuinely lost for words. She had never been asked this before. This was all new. And this—was _normal_. Being called pretty by the boys in her class was one thing, but being approached by someone she didn’t know was another entirely.   


She feels abubbling warmth birth within her belly, and she recognises the feeling a little too late; she felt _flattered_ , spiked with womanly confidence, and a new kind of flaunt—but her conscience is held back by a single thought, one that reduces her to the mentality of an eleven year old girl. 

_ How had Noah approached her?  _

She blinks, in fleeting thought, unable to think, bound by a blank, anchored mind. 

Magnus must have been within earshot of the one-sided conversation, because he appears at her side like a towering phantom, wallet in hand, the contrast in their appearances a strange sight for any outsider. “Dude, she’s fifteen,” he says, as he hands the guy the owed money, “and _taken_ ,” before shutting the door. 

* * *

The three of them sit in the lounge, in front of the television that was playing a film of Magnus’ choice (another cult classic of sorts) and Elisabeth picks at the pepperoni on her slice of pizza. She wasn’t in the mood for meat. She wasn’t in the mood for food at all, actually, when she licked her lips. She wasn’t sure what mood she was in. The previous moment of being approached by a total stranger had been imprinted within her head, and after it had happened, it was all she could think about. 

It was the realisation of knowing she was teetering on the cusp of becoming a young woman, and when she would be noticed by all kinds of eyes.   


But Noah had noticed her _before_ that.

It was almost like he had been able to predict her development. He _knew_ she would become beautiful. 

_Perhaps that makes him even more special_ , she thinks absently, staring through the television screen, not really watching the film. She rarely payed much attention to these things when she was with Franziska and Magnus. 

When she notices how enrapt the other two were with the film, she finds herself slowly falling asleep, cheek lazily pressed against Magnus’ warm arm. It’s only when he jolts to his feet does she snap awake with a racing, startled heart. 

“THE COOKIES—“ He exclaims, and jumps up, knocking his shin into the glass coffee table in front of them as he dashes for the kitchen, and Franziska lurches forward to steady the drinks they had poured. “— _FUCK ME_ —that _hurt_ —“

Elisabeth blinks tiredly, bewildered, unsure of what he was having a fit over, until she could smell the sweet, overcooked scent of burnt cookie-dough waft into the lounge. She turns her head to find herself alone on the sofa, and realises a moment too late that Franziska had ran in after him. 

* * *

“Why can’t I do anything right?” 

Elisabeth is still able to smile, despite the Friday-night dreariness. She giggles at little, and Magnus sends her a look she can’t quite decipher. It was one of his iconic stares; where his pupils narrowed down to pin-pricks, his approach full of perplexity, and where she was unsure if he was being funny or genuinely serious. 

Eyes stiff and tired, she blinks at him, her movements gradual and predictive. She wraps her arms around his waist and gives him a squeeze of reassurance. She could smell her sister on him. 

“They’re honestly not that bad,” Franziska says, smacking her lips together. The tips of her lithe fingers were covered in melted chocolate. “They’re just—crispy.”

“They’re not  _ meant _ to be fucking  _ crispy _ ,” Magnus grumbles, one arm absently hanging around Elisabeth’s small frame as he reaches across the kitchen counter to lift one of the biscuits, and breaks it in half. It fractures with a hard snap against the baking tray. The chocolate chips they had added to the dough had been reduced to molten liquid. 

“They’re meant to be _chewy_.” Magnus mutters dejectedly. Elisabeth watches his lips. She pulls away from his parental embrace to make a reply. 

“ _I like them crispy. They taste nicer_.” She says. He frowns at her a little, and gives her that same perplexed expression, always trying his best to understand her. She points at the tray-bakes and gives him a thumbs-up gesture. She glances to her sister and notices how a grin of agreement had spread across Franziska’s face. 

Magnus sighs. One corner of his mouth quirks in reconsideration. “Thanks. I guess.”

* * *

When Monday comes, she’s half-annoyed at the amount of work her class had been given from their teacher. She had an end-of-unit test the following Friday—which meant she would have to spend the hours after school studying for it. It wasn’t an important test, but she knew if she didn’t start to put in the effort, karma would eventually come back to bite her—Elisabeth didn’t want her mother or father involved with her education.

All parents seemed to have the unconscious ability to put pressure on everything, and pressure was the last thing a girl her age needed.

If Noah didn’t exist, she wouldn’t even be annoyed about it. But he did. And that was where the problem was. She was annoyed because she knew she wouldn’t be able to see him throughout the week—and she wouldn’t be able to see him at the weekend, either.

Franziska had mentioned the group were going to the lake on the Friday evening for a get-together. Martha had said the weather forecast for that night was meant to be super nice. It would be warm and wonderful, and everyone would be there, which meant Elisabeth would be unable to slip away to see Noah unnoticed. 

She visits him at the church, straight after school, and she’s reminded of the thoughts she had last weekend. The assertive part of her wanted to ask what they were to one another—as people, and as lovers—but the rest of her head told her not to. She was happy with him right now, and that was all that currently mattered. Why would she say something that could potentially lead to a disagreement? But, more importantly— _why_ was she thinking it could lead to a disagreement?

“ _I’m fucked off_.”

It’s the first thing she signs to him, that Tuesday afternoon. Noah blinks, and leans on the stick of the floor brush he was grasping. Elisabeth could see the golden hairs that sprouted along his exposed, wiry forearms, in the daylight that flooded through the ornate, stained-glass windows of the church. 

“Why are you fucked off?” He asks back.

“ _Because I can’t see you this weekend_.”

“Why not?”

Elisabeth grits her teeth. “ _My sister has something planned at the lake. With her friends. It will be weird if I don’t show up._ ”

Noah opens his mouth, then closes it, as though he were attempting to rephrase what he was going to say. “…What are you talking about?” 

She rolls her eyes at him, impatient. She sits down on one of the glossy hardwood benches, dropping her bag to the polished floor. “ _I can’t see you this weekend. I have to stay with the others._ ”

Noah watches her, face blank, and then to her surprise and confusion, he lets out a laugh, his white teeth baring. “She hasn’t told you, has she? That would be typical of her.”

“ _Who?_ ”

“Your sister.” Noah continues, still smiling. “She dropped by at the tavern yesterday. Found me working in the pub. She invited me to come with you all on Friday, to the lake.”

Elisabeth stares at him. She blinks. “ _Really?_ ”

He nods.

“ _Are you sure?_ ”

He nods again—and in mere seconds she’s jumping at him with joy. Noah drops the floor brush in shock when he feels her figure latch onto his front, Elisabeth’s girlish thighs locking around his waist, and he has to wrap his arms around her whole body so he doesn’t drop her.

“Magnus was right!” She vocally exclaims, blonde hair all around them. Noah laughs breathlessly, frowning a little in confusion, half-understanding her. 

“What did—Magnus tell you?” He questions with a grunt, holding her weight.

“That Franziska likes you.”

“You’ve been sharing secrets with Magnus?”

Elisabeth stops. She feels her cheeks bloom pink, and as if on cue, he lets her go. She drops to her heels with a clack against the stone floor.

“ _I haven’t said much_.” She signs. “ _Don’t worry._ ”

Noah shakes his head. “I’m not worried at all,” He says, and smiles as he steps forward to her. Elisabeth tilts her head up to meet his gaze. He settles both his hands at either sides of her arms, and pulls her close. “I’m glad.”

“ _Good_.” She signs, with a grin. “ _Because Magnus really wants to meet you. For real.”_

Noah hums. He searches her eyes. “Well, that’s nice to know. At least I have one fan.”

Elisabeth giggles. Her fingers toy with the front of his shirt. His eyes flick down at her hands.

“Careful,” He whispers with a stupid smile. “I don’t have another one to put on if you rip it.”

Elisabeth snorts, and pushes him away, even though her fingers ached to grip at his arms, and to have him squeeze the life out of her in return—to never let her go—but she takes a couple of steps back, remembering with a nagging bitterness that she had to start revising for the class test on Friday. She sighs through her nose as she goes to pick up her bag, with much reluctance.

“Off to study?” Noah asks.

She nods with a heavy head.

“Good.” He adds.

“ _It’s a pain_.” She signs.

“Are you aware of how important your education is?”

Elisabeth doesn’t say anything. She only looks at him, silently fumbling to work him out, to try and gage what his motives were, but there was nothing. His face was unreadable.

She stands still when he slowly wanders up to her again, once he had picked up the floor brush and set it aside against the benches. His hands find themselves at her arms for a second time, just like before, yet the dynamic had been subtly altered.

“Are you aware that your education is more important than I am? Right now?” He inquires, and she rolls her eyes at him in reply.

“ _That’s not true_.” She says.

“Well, then, any boyfriends yet?”

She blinks. It takes her a few seconds to register the dreaded words that rolled off his tongue. A flash of heat crosses her face, and she instinctively steps away from him, her gestures quick and instant.

“ _What? No!_ ”

Noah almost balks at her reply, and Elisabeth receives the impression that she was clueless to something she should be aware of. “No one has approached you?”

Her gut swoops for a split second as she recalls the young man that had delivered the pizza last weekend. She recalls the time when Yasin had told her the boys in her class thought she was pretty.

“No.” She says, with her voice this time, her head elsewhere, and the answer is a kind of half-lie, not completely truthful but not a total fib at the same time. It was like she and Noah were intuitively fused. 

“ _Just you_.” She adds, with gentle fingers. Noah blinks. He nods.

Elisabeth swallows. “ _Why are you asking?_ ”

Noah licks his lips. The playfulness he always embodied somehow subsides. He glances her down, as though he were sizing her up in contemplation. “Well, you’re—“ he starts, with a slight shrug of his shoulder, a sliver of awkwardness slipping into his voice, “—you’re growing.”

_Growing_ , Elisabeth repeats, in her head.

She can feel the unexplained apprehension hang like wet laundry within the air of the church. She realises how small she felt, and how naive she was. She was _growing_. That was what she had wanted, time and time again, every time Noah gently refused her eager advancements. And it was _happening_.

_ I won’t be a child forever. _

A needling stab of confused disappointment pierces her lungs at the thought—but she ruthlessly brushes it off with a smile that she sends to Noah. 

“ _That means you have to up your game if I find someone else._ ” She teases.

“ _I don’t think I have to_ ,” He signs, and comes close, and she feels his hands cup her face, his fingers warm and dry behind her jawbone, his thumbs brushing the pearl earrings her mother had bought for her birthday. 

“Why?” She mouths to him, eyes lingering at his parted lips. His skin signifies his age, up close. The phantoms of to-be laugh lines were barely visible, but they were there, waiting to be brought into the physical.

Noah runs an affectionate thumb across her cheekbone. “Because I know you’ve found what you came for.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is going to be MAD. Hope y’all like some truth or dare ;)


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The group go to the lake, in the warm, bluish evening of summer. Elisabeth slips into the nearby woods, and Noah follows after her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, this took years to update, let’s hope it’s not too shabby lol. Thank you for all the previous comments in the last chapter, they always make my day better <3 (also please refer to the tags while reading this chapter).

“ _What are you like when you’re drunk?_ ” Elisabeth asks, when they’re stood in the warm, still, mellow evening. Noah was fumbling to unlock the backdoor to the pub’s storeroom. He glances at her as she signs the words, mousy hair briefly falling across his eyes, and he smiles that stupid smile. It was the smile that made him look younger than what he was.

“You’ll find out,” He switches on a light, and the single bulb that hung from the ceiling poorly illuminates the dark room. Elisabeth observes him. He reaches up to one of the shelves and lifts down an eight-pack of beer cans.

“ _Tell me anyway_.” She presses, the next time his eyes cross hers. He hands her the drinks. “ _I want to know_.” She mouths, and he quirks one corner of his mouth in thought as he turns to lift down another pack. She taps her fingers against the tall metal cans. She was old enough to drink now, but it wasn’t something she was desperate to dive into.

“When I’m smashed…I could probably look at a table and think it’s the funniest thing on Earth.”

Elisabeth sets the cans at her feet. “ _Why would a table be funny?_ ”

“Well, it’s not. That’s the point.”

“ _It’s funny because it’s not funny?_ ”

Noah blinks. He shrugs. “Yeah. Whatever.”

When Friday came, she could hardly contain her excitement. It was a quiet sort of thrill that overcame her while she was sat in school, taking the test she had been previously studying for. She felt surprisingly good once it was over, albeit still being stuck with the lingering anxiety, but despite that, she felt confident she had done well.

Afterward, close to the end of last period, Elisabeth had lightly imagined all the potential ways the get-together could play out; a total disaster, or the way she wanted it to be—fun. In some humorous way, she felt as though Noah and her were already an unconscious item under the group’s eyes, and tonight would become Noah’s initiation—to prove that he was everything Elisabeth needed, and everything that the group didn’t know they _wanted_.

The idea would have been funny if it wasn’t for the questionable age gap between them, and it would have been funny if it wasn’t for Franziska’s chronic suspicion as well as everyone’s opinions, but that would only surface if they all knew what was actually happening.

_It’s almost like meeting the in-laws_ , Elisabeth thinks.

_ But that won’t happen. Noah would never let that happen. We both know what would happen. _

_ We’re happy this way. _

Despite Franziska being the one to invite Noah to come along with the rest of them, for a few instances prior to what was happening now, Elisabeth remembered her sister’s persistence on having Magnus take her to the lake instead of Noah. The only reason Elisabeth could think of would be that Franziska had suddenly decided Noah had the libido of a bull seeing red—when, in reality, he was actually quite the opposite.

Elisabeth smirks a little to herself at the thought.

_ Unless provoked. _

“Ready to go?” Noah breathes as he pulls his rucksack across his back. He brushes his hair out of his face before ushering her backwards so he could lock the storeroom door. “Fuck, it’s warm.” He adds in a whisper.

Initially, Noah had opted to take the bike he occasionally borrowed from his colleague so they wouldn’t have to endure the walk, but Elisabeth disagreed when the weather turned out better than what they had anticipated a week before. 

Every summer felt the same to Elisabeth. Every summer was like the day before yesterday, the mild, nostalgic balminess infused with some of her most precious experiences, most of which involved Noah.Summer was automatically associated with Noah. That’s why she loved it so much. 

The two walk down the offbeat path to the lake in a comfortable silence that made her quietly beam to herself, eyes cast to the woodland ground. She reaches out a hand to pick at the shrubbery they passed, and eventually and inevitably, finds herself slipping her fingers into one of Noah’s relaxed palms. He smiles down at her, cheeks momentarily dimpling as he pulls her close to his side. Their hips bump. 

A moment after she pulls her hand away to sign. “ _Excited?_ ” 

“I guess.” Noah answers. “It’ll be nice to get to know everyone,” he stops as he takes another glance at her, and he grins a little. “I think you’re more excited than I am, though.”

Elisabeth feels his fingers curl around her skinny forearm. His fingers were like a cuff of comfort she never wanted to take off. Then they separate, and glide down to clasp her delicate hand in one fluid motion. 

* * *

They reach the sandbank at the cusp of evening meeting dusk, and somewhere along the way the air had came to a standstill around them, as though time had slowed the passing world with every step they took to finding the group. Elisabeth was met with the familiar feeling of arriving home when she took off her shoes to dig her toes into the cool sand, and grinned up at Magnus when he ruffled the crown of her wild blonde hair. 

A certain kind of divide came between her and Noah. Not a bad divide, but she was unsure whether or not to call it a good one. In the midst of Franziska asking her if her feet hurt from walking, out of her periphery she watched how the boys interacted with one another. Noah was smiling, and he didn’t seem as closeted as she thought he would be, because from the way in which he was speaking to Magnus and Bartosz he looked open—and approachable. That observant streak in his gaze had gone to sleep, and the habitual knit between his brows had softened. 

Elisabeth blinks. 

_ How does he do it?  _

“Eli.”

The tap on the side of her face is enough to jolt her back to the present, and she turns her head to Franziska, who was unpacking one of three large blankets. Elisabeth recognised them. Franziska had taken them from the house, along with some pillows and cushions. 

“Help me spread these out?” She asks.

While she helped her sister, Elisabeth noticed Martha had brought some candles to put around the sandbank, and Jonas was fiddling to light them. She watches the couple exchange a few words from where they were sat in the sand, Jonas smiling at whatever Martha was mumbling about. Bartosz had already started pouring drinks into small chunky glasses from an expensive-looking bottle, one of a few he lifted from the kitchen when his parents were oblivious to his whereabouts. 

Eventually, as dusk settled, Elisabeth finds herself sat amongst the group in a small circle, with her bare legs stretched out against the blankets beneath them, watching the flickering flames of the little campfire Magnus had been able to create—with the help of Google, and the painfully hilarious frustration, all of which Martha quietly videoed on her phone. It was only then Elisabeth noticed Mikkel was nowhere to be seen. She frowns a little to herself, and a small pang of remembrance hits her chest. She recalls the day of her fifteenth birthday in the forest, when he had demonstrated one of his magic tricks to her. 

She reaches across to touch Martha, who was carefully attempting to push several marshmallows onto barbecue sticks for everyone. She had enforced the same pattern with each of them. Pink, white, pink, white. 

“ _Mikkel?_ ” Elisabeth mouths to her. 

Martha shakes her head, chestnut hair gleaming auburn against the lambent light of the fire. “He’s caught a cold.” She replies, and glances down at the finished marshmallow stick before handing it to Elisabeth. “Too ill to come out. Fever.”

Elisabeth nods before going to sit back. A part of her was glad that Mikkel wasn’t here. It wasn’t a negative kind of glad she felt; it was one of relief. She liked being the youngest in the group. It would have been awkward if Mikkel was there with them, because then there would’ve been the unconscious expectation of him and Elisabeth to be off to one side doing their own thing—because apparently, in everyone else’s eyes, they had more in common because they were similar in age. But that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, Elisabeth felt as though she and Mikkel were beginning to grow apart as they each reached their own stage of maturity. It was a weird feeling, and Elisabeth didn’t like it one bit. 

And yet, at the same time, a sliver of her anxiety asked herself: _what if I forget how to interact with people my own age?_

“Stupid.” She utters to herself, the word barely a breath. She bites into one of the marshmallows and her teeth hits the wooden stick, and forgets she was meant to toast them. Then, as if on cue, she feels Noah sit down beside her, and the brief sensation of his shoulder brushing hers is more than enough to rid the brewing paranoia. 

He glances at her, and searches his face for a moment. She tries to figure out what was different about him, because he embodied a foreign look of shyness on his face—but then she smelled the sharp tang of alcohol emit from him. She notices the can of beer settled under his fingertips then, and she nearly laughs at him if it wasn’t for the marshmallow she was chewing on. There was no tables to laugh at, so he was going to have to find something else. 

With the firelight in front of them she could see how angular his cheekbones were. The depths of his wintry eyes glowed like little suns, and against the light they seemed darker than what they actually were. He had brushed his hair back, and if she looked close enough, she could decipher where the tiny scar his sister had given him ended and began. 

Noah pulls his eyes away from her then, and she follows his gaze to Magnus, who was holding a pair of Bluetooth speakers. He says something she was unable to read, and Noah laughs in reply. 

For a momentary instant, Elisabeth imagined Noah’s fingers reaching out to curl around one of the little wireless boxes. He would lift it up, and press it hard into the bones that made up her chest—until she could feel it leave an imprint—and she’d feel the music play within her body. They would be barefoot in the sand, and wild-eyed. The group would eventually become a pack, and everyone would circle the fire. Noah would smell of smoke, the earth, and that same astringent tang of alcohol. Elisabeth would be his cure, and he would be her Achilles’ heel. 

“ _Music_.” She signs to him, and Noah smiles at her. His fingers move across the blanket they were sat upon with swift ease, and the fire casts a shadow of his hand against her skin as they finally settle against her knee. His eyes flick to meet hers, and she realises it’s the same pair of eyes that looked at her during the early hours of her fifteenth birthday. It was the same gaze of want. 

Elisabeth swallows. She feels his fingers against her. 

Tap. 

Tap. Tap. 

Tap. 

She smiles to herself. Then she feels him pull away. 

* * *

She’s unsure of how much time has passed, but it feels like two hours or more have disappeared, based on her observation of the darkened sky, and the growing vitality of the fire Magnus was persistent in keeping alive for the rest of the night.

The heady scent of alcohol passed her every so often, usually when someone got up from the circle they had created. She had only taken a couple of sips from one of the glasses Franziska had given her to try. She tried a few different ones, just to join in, and had grimaced at the taste of them all, only to settle on having a can of coke.

Magnus had started to pass around a couple of spliffs, and while everyone talked amongst themselves, she sat back on her elbows and glanced up at the sky once more. The rising smoke of the fire made it difficult to see the glittering stars. A minute later she sits up again, and her eyes land on Noah for the millionth time.

At some point within the evening he had moved further away from her, when Jonas struck a conversation with him. Elisabeth figured she had been with both Martha and Franziska, because now when she observed the arrangement around the fire, the sexes seemed almost naturally divided.

She watches how Noah takes in a long drag of the joint he held between his fingers. She liked watching how his cheeks hollowed out, and how the natural frown on his face began to relax and soften out. It was an infrequent process.

Their eyes meet then, and he’s suddenly crawling toward her, amidst the preoccupied group that didn’t seem to care at all. Perhaps she was being too paranoid after all. 

“Wanna try?” He asks, when he’s sat beside her again. She turns her body to face him and crosses her legs, and steals a glance of her sister. Franziska was perched at Magnus’ hip, in love and infused with drink, and totally oblivious.

_Fuck it_ , Elisabeth thinks, and takes the joint from Noah’s fingers. The inhale hits the back of her throat almost immediately, and she attempts to suppress her cough. Noah chuckles, and plucks the roll back, and goes to take another drag. His eyes never leave hers as he does it, and Elisabeth is unsure whether or not to find the look titillating or ridiculous. The dense smoke seeps from his parted lips, and all sense of humour left her head for that second—even though the act of smoking didn’t appeal to her—he somehow made it look seriously attractive.

Noah turns to pass the joint to Jonas, before going to sit back on his elbows. Elisabeth watches him. She purses her lips in thought.

“ _What are you thinking about?_ ” She signs.

Noah blinks slowly, like a tired dog. With his eyes, he motions to the dark, inviting lake that sat still and watchful in front of the group.

“ _You were beautiful in there_.” He mouths. She grins a little, and forces herself to swallow down the giddiness. His eyes flick her up and down, just once, and then the mildest note of a familiar hunger births it’s way into his gaze, and Elisabeth feels every part of its invisibility stroke her exposed skin.

And then, unable to think with everything that was happening, she quietly realises with youthful fright that she wanted him. She wanted him that way. She further imagines, with a subtle hint of fear, what his fingers would feel like. _Soft. Gentle._ She swallows. _Assertive. Encouraging_. He would coax her like he always did. That was his lure—and she would watch him utter out formless words at her temple, eyes hooded, sometimes smiling, white canines visible for a mere second before vanishing beneath his upper lip.

Palpable arousal alights the inside of her gut, and when her eyes meet Noah’s, she knew he had somehow noticed. They were somehow inherently bound. Perhaps this was how true balance felt.

_This is how lovers are meant to feel_ , Elisabeth thinks, the moment she presses her bare thighs together. _And this is torture._ She pulls her knees to her chest. _And I’m in love with it_. She pulls her eyes away from him to realise what she was thinking, and very quietly came the smallest of awakenings: _am I ready?_

It would be so easy to get up and vanish into the dark of the forest and wait for Noah to find her, while the rest of her friends got high and drunk and continue being unaware to what was happening right beneath their noses. The idea made her remember when she had so willingly taken her clothes off throughout the woodland, and Noah followed and picked up the remains, both of them treating the process like a treasure hunt of enticement—and she was the prize.

If she left right now, this would be the same.

_But different_ —Elisabeth adds, once again coming back to the present, and she feels physically empty— _I’ll make it different_ —like a void. With nothing to hold onto. Nothing to hug. Nothing to embrace. She begins to understand the primitive logic of her body, then. The two sexes really were like a lock and key. Opposing puzzle pieces. Positive and negative. Black and white. Entrance and exit. Good and evil. They were the epitome of dualism in all contexts.

The next time Elisabeth glances at Noah, he’s smiling very subtly, as though he were proud of something he had done. It made her realise (for the umpteenth time) how he was more of a boy than a man in these situations, but that made the experience all the more fun and stupid.

She gets up from where she was sat, body still alight and head hazy. Regardless of how much she wanted him, she didn’t want to be thinking of Noah like this when her friends were sat amongst them. Sure, there was the thrill and fantasised secrecy, but there was also the guilt and deception that came with it—but her relationship with Noah has always been like that, so why should she be only realising this now?

Franziska had reached out a wearily concerned hand to touch Elisabeth’s ankle as she passed behind her, and asked if she was okay. Elisabeth had said it was the smoke. Franziska just nodded, and said they would play some games soon.

She doesn’t look back at Noah as she leaves the group and the fire, but she feels his eyes trail after her as she walks. The sand is welcomingly cold at her bare feet, and she’s eventually met with the faint crunch of dry leaves and flat, dry earth. She ponders for a while, aimless with where she was going throughout the dark, and she suddenly becomes aware of her internal silence. It felt good to be alone sometimes. Being alone meant time for self-reflection, but this wasn’t going to be for that.

Approximately ten minutes after wandering away from the group she nearly screams—when a pair of fingers settle ever so gently at the back of her neck, and a hand flits round her face to clap her mouth shut.

When Elisabeth sees its Noah that had her caught in the blue dark, he lets her go, and she breaks into a shuddering laugh. Her fingertips flit to where his palm had been pressed to her lips. It was nice to have been touched like that. It was nice to feel that kind of pressure. 

“ _Your sister asked me to come find you_.” He signs, exaggerating his movements in the lowlight so she could understand him, and the little thought of that warms her heart.

“ _To bring me back?_ ” She replies.

He takes a step forward. “ _To always bring you back._ ”

They stand there for a minute. Noah was probably absorbing a lot more than she was in those seconds, for he could hear everything. The forest. Nature. The distant, echoing laughter of the group. His heart. Her breathing. He embodied a sense that would heighten every experience he endured. The people closest to Elisabeth had that too. But she didn’t, and she never truly would.

But none of that bothers her, because in this moment, right now, she experienced the physical in a different way entirely.

When Noah goes to kiss her she nearly melts against him, elated by the previous build-up to the present, and she doesn’t make any move to reject his advancements when he unforgivingly buries his hands underneath her top. She laughs against his lips, feels him grin, teeth hard and wet.

Once his palms are covering the expanse of her rib cage he presses his thumbs into her breasts, and she breathes out, and he suddenly feels so much bigger than her. Body, height, frame, everything, and Elisabeth had longed to be consumed by all of this.

Noah very gently manoeuvres her body against his, and she’s backed against a nearby tree trunk in a matter of minutes that felt like seconds. She sets her hands at his chest, allows her fingers to feel him. She touches his collar, then his sternum. She feels the delicate outlines of the bones that created his chest; his skin felt warm and thin to touch, and it felt as if she could simply dig her nails into him and draw blood. He breathes into her neck, and she touches his throat, feels him swallow with anticipation.

She’s timidly aware of how his knee presses against her inner thigh. She feels how warm and tantalisingly rough the jean material is at her bare skin, and she’s unable to process how quick his hand finds itself in the front of her shorts. Noah’s fingertips firmly rest against the cotton of her underwear—and her girlhood.

Elisabeth unconsciously asks for time to slow, and somehow, in her head, it does. She felt awfully strange and frighteningly small against his hand, and something almost nostalgic blanks her state of mind in those few moments. This was the same hand she had held when she first entered the caves with him, girlish fingers grappling at his lean wrist. This was the hand that had mended her cut feet—the hand that had always caressed her cheeks and held her face.

_And now it’s in the front of my underwear_ , she thinks, rather humorously, but something prevents her from smiling at the thought. Her eyelids flutter. She breathes steadily. Her chest rises high, and Noah presses the face of his fingers into her, ensuring his movements are soft and temporary.

In the dark, he breaks away from her lips, and holds her gaze as he slowly touches her, cool eyes watchful and observant. Elisabeth finds it oddly comforting, but half a second after she’s unable to look him in the eye. Not like this. Not when he was doing _this_. Not when she was such in a position, willingly vulnerable and helplessly beneath him; feverish, as though she were an animal in heat.

His middle finger presses something painfully and wonderfully sensitive—right where she had always liked it, with the same pressure she gave herself—and she instinctively finds herself standing on her bare, bruised tiptoes at the feeling. She feels the bark she’s pressed against graze the backs of her arms, but she doesn’t feel the discomfort, nor the pain.

This feeling wasn’t just arousal. In some disturbing way, it was almost like the adrenaline a small animal receives when it gets caught in a trap. The thought of a little rabbit enters her head. She half-imagined it chewing it’s own leg off in order to escape it’s pursuer, and her conscience murmurs in response: _I think I’d rather die._

Her abdomen hollows as she sucks in a shaky breath, and a wolffish grin of achievement crosses Noah’s expression.She feels his wrist press against her womb, warm palm against her sex, fingers prodding, deep and beautifully intrusive, desperate to make her squirm even more.

Elisabeth lets out a laugh at his eagerness, both flattered and overwhelmed, ready to lift her top up for him again—but then her breath violently shudders when, for a brief moment, his fingers pull her underwear aside—but before she can experience the intimacy of his skin against hers she grasps his wrist, an immediate chill ascending her spine as instant as lightening.

_Fuck_ , Elisabeth thinks. _What am I doing?_

Noah freezes. He breathes, and she feels his eyes penetrate her face in questioning and worry. Her suddenness had divided all present heated attraction between them, and at the sight of her withdrawn exterior, she feels his hand disappear from her body.

_Fuck, fuck, fuck_ , she thinks, over and over in a mind-numbing chant. Everything was perfect. From the moment Noah had glanced at the lake and said he thought her beautiful, everything was perfect—for this moment. 

“Did I ruin it?”

The words emit from her lips in a whisper she’s unaware of even creating, pronunciation indistinguishable beneath the gentle sounds of the forest, but as her eyes flutter up to meet Noah’s his brow twitches inwards, as though he were asking her to repeat what she had said, and then she panics, incredibly quietly.

“ _I’m sorry_.” She signs.

Noah blinks, bewildered. He shakes his head, and his hands find the sides of her bark-grazed arms, and pulls her close. Gentle, loving Noah; this had to be beyond his self-control.

“It’s okay.” He says. His fingers flit under her chin, and he tilts her head up, much to Elisabeth’s shyness. “You’re okay.”

He brushes back her hair coaxingly, until she’s looking him in the eyes. He lifts his hands to sign. “If you don’t want to do something, make sure to slap me.”

That makes her laugh.

“I’m not kidding, Elisabeth.” He adds, but hearing her laughter had brought the smallest of smiles to his lips, and the lightheartedness in his gaze reminded her that this was all a game. This was fun. It was fun she was supposed to enjoy—trial and error came with all of that. None of this was supposed to be taken seriously. She was allowed to shy away if she wanted to. Those were the rules, weren’t they? 

“ _…I don’t want you to think that you have to do these kind of things, just because I’m—initiating them_.” Noah adds, his movements careful and slow.

Elisabeth nods. She knew. She knew before, and she knew now. “ _I know_.”

“Are you sure?”

She nods again. And again. And again, just to assure him. He leans down to plant a kiss on her lips, and she wraps her arms around the expanse of his back. He pecks her cheek afterward, timid but playful.

Elisabeth was conscious of the fact that Noah desired more assurance than she did, and in some ways, he would always need more than her—but she had yet to become aware of why.

Because in the end, if the lid of their affair was to be blown off, whether that be the group’s doing, her family’s, or some exterior party, it wasn’t Elisabeth that was going to be landed in the trouble.

“Let’s go get drunk.” Noah says, long fingers ruffling her silky tousled hair.

It would be him. 


End file.
